The "negative opinion" playthrough was my longest one yet. I had to save and reload several times. It turns out it's much too easy to get someone to like you by accident. At one point, I threatened to kill someone and it raised his attitude by +3 points. Granted, it was a villainous warlord, but other, less cartoonish characters had similarly unpredictable reactions. At another point, I had to reload and then completely avoid meeting a certain character because I could not figure out any way to offend him. Luckily, this involved running out in the middle of a meeting with the leader of the Consortium, so it wasn't too out of character for my irresponsible rogue agent. In the end, I wound up getting drummed out of the organization entirely.
I will give Consortium this, though - playing as an asshole did change how the game felt. It was definitely more of a thriller, with a lot more hostility and suspicion. Of course, much of that extra negativity was directed at me, but you can't have everything. My main disappointment with the asshole playthrough is that the pivotal moment of the whole story, and the most noir-ish moment in a game that is, ostensibly, a murder mystery, is one you can only witness if you fail to rescue another character earlier in the game. It wouldn't be so bad, except that the rescue mission is so easy that you'd never stumble upon it accidentally. You literally just have to walk into a room, suffer a slight bit of damage, and press the action button. In order to fail it, I had to turn around and leave as soon as I entered the chamber.
Which is a shame, because it would have been a thrilling mind-screw if I'd encountered the scene organically. One of the ship's engineers tells you some secret information and then suddenly the oxygen starts to leave the room. With his dying breath, he accuses the ship's pilot, a man who is consistently portrayed as a technical genius, but who is having a suspicious amount of trouble overriding the door lock, of being in league with the enemy. It's a great mislead, because the pilot was very aggressively friendly, and thus a good suspect for the end game, but the only reason he fails is because he's injured by the accident you failed to save him from earlier in the game. If you first see the scene as I did, after a successful rescue, the pilot manages to save the day in the nick of time and any suspicion you have of him is immediately dispelled.
I guess what I learned from this playthrough is that the content for a good mystery is there, in the game, but it's too well hidden. Consortium doesn't go out of its way to toy with you. It doesn't give you superfluous information and let you draw wrong conclusions from your bad assumptions. Instead, it requires you to deliberately search out confusion. For example, this was the first runthrough where I actually found the evidence that implicates the true traitor, but it was in a cupboard and by the time you're able to find it, the game has already trained you to ignore cupboards by having literally every other container in the game contain nothing of interest.
I'm guessing it's an artifact of Consortium being an indie game. With a game like Skyrim, there's probably a person whose only job is to go through every map and ensure that all the cupboards have a setting-appropriate amount of clutter and also the occasional useful potion or unique outfit. Or maybe there's an algorithm that does it. Either way, they had the resources to put in plot-irrelevant discoveries. A smaller production would probably need to be more parsimonious with its dead-ends.
If I were playing this game purely for pleasure, I think this is where I'd walk away. I still have 13 achievements to acquire, and several of them are plot-related, but I think I've seen 90 percent or more of the dialogue, and I'm right at the cusp where the satisfaction of learning new things is perfectly balance by the annoyance of having to watch almost everything for the fifth time. So, of course, I'm bound by honor to do violence to my memories of Consortium by repeating it until I can't stand to look at it any more. I blame Interdimensional Games. They should have made it 5 hours instead of 4.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Sunday, February 4, 2018
Consortium - 9/20 hours
Third run completed in almost exactly two hours. This is not a good sign. Some of that can be chalked up to my refusing to say anything to anybody and thus cutting out about half the dialogue, but the larger part is surely just me getting used to the game and knowing where everything is. I expect future runs to be almost as fast.
Playing a silent protagonist wasn't as funny as I had originally hoped. There were amusing moments, where my lack of response flustered, annoyed, or confused the NPCs, but mostly they just skipped conversations. The oddest thing about it was that my results were almost exactly the same as my first game, where I went with my gut. The only real difference between the two was that in my most recent game, I didn't tell the doctor I was a dimensional traveler.
This can mean one of two things - either I did really poorly my first time through, or the bulk of this game is listening to NPCs talk and the plot is only marginally affected by having you there at all. I suspect that I will have to act as extremely as possible in future runs to find out which theory is correct.
Going forward, I plan to use a guide to help me snag as many achievements as possible. For my next run, I intend to be a total pariah and go for the achievement for everyone having a negative opinion of you. I expect it will be unpleasant and frustrating, but if anything is going to trigger a different story, that will be it.
Playing a silent protagonist wasn't as funny as I had originally hoped. There were amusing moments, where my lack of response flustered, annoyed, or confused the NPCs, but mostly they just skipped conversations. The oddest thing about it was that my results were almost exactly the same as my first game, where I went with my gut. The only real difference between the two was that in my most recent game, I didn't tell the doctor I was a dimensional traveler.
This can mean one of two things - either I did really poorly my first time through, or the bulk of this game is listening to NPCs talk and the plot is only marginally affected by having you there at all. I suspect that I will have to act as extremely as possible in future runs to find out which theory is correct.
Going forward, I plan to use a guide to help me snag as many achievements as possible. For my next run, I intend to be a total pariah and go for the achievement for everyone having a negative opinion of you. I expect it will be unpleasant and frustrating, but if anything is going to trigger a different story, that will be it.
Consortium - 7/20 hours
It's not a great sign that I was able to complete my second run of Consortium in 3 and a half hours. At that rate, I'll need three more full playthroughs and the better part of a sixth. If I come to be even more efficient . . .
But that's a problem for the future. For now, I'm mostly concerned with teasing out the secrets of the Consortium universe. It's not going well. Having played through the game a second time, it's become clear to me that it is mostly a series of conversations, with some flexibility on the order, but only minimal cross-influence between them. I did see a whole new scene because I allowed a certain character to believe we were speaking confidentially. The first time through, I told him we were being monitored because I assumed the game would find another way to give me his information as a reward for being honest (though I now realize this isn't that sort of game). However, the additional scene wasn't particularly enlightening. I met with Knight 15 (don't ask me about the Consortium's rank system - everyone keeps yelling at me every time I try and get some clarification) before the traitor attacks, instead of just going directly into the confrontation.
However, that confrontation was short-circuited because I correctly guessed the traitor's identity and Rook 25 (again, don't ask) cornered her before she could hack the power armor and make it go berserk. I'd love to credit my amazing deductive skills for figuring out the answer to the game's central mystery, but honestly, I had no evidence and I just played a hunch - someone once told me that this character couldn't possibly be the traitor because of her backstory, and I was like, hmm, why would the game go out of its way to make her seem innocent when, in fact, there is no evidence against anybody?
I mean, there's probably evidence to be found somewhere in the game, but after two times through, I haven't seen any. Which is kind of the opposite of how a locked-room mystery is supposed to go. There should be too much evidence, and everyone should have a motive, and as the heat turns up on the investigation, they should turn on each other and attempt to convince the investigator that it was anyone but them. But Agatha Christie this is not. The crew of the Zenlil stayed loyal to each other, refused to believe any of them could be a murderer (one of them even doubted a murder had taken place), and consistently counseled me to just wait until we landed so the authorities could handle the matter.
Like I said, Consortium is not that kind of game. It seems to almost resent the fact that it's a story. The biggest culprit is the framing device. I guess I understand why it's there - if you want to establish a theme of choices and consequences, then the concept of multiple close-copy alternate dimensions is a tempting one to play around with. And if you're doing a many-worlds setting, then leaning on the fourth wall and saying that the real-world player is, in fact, simply watching from another, more distant dimension, and thus part of the game's story in a much more direct way than usual would seem like a fun extension of the same basic idea. However, as near as I can tell, the only reason this alternate dimesion stuff is included in the game is to make the player feel like an idiot.
It occasionally crops up in your dialogue options, but almost without fail, if you pick those options, the people around you will react negatively - either thinking that you're dicking around amid serious business or that you're purposefully being evasive, or that you're losing your grip on reality. Which would be fine if it only came up as a smart-ass dialogue option, but sometimes it's a major plot point. There's a guy who asks you your name, but that's not something you know, because everyone always calls you by your code name, Bishop 6. Try to dodge the question and he calls you out on it. And then he asks you again. Select the dialogue option where you give him a name, and it turns out to be the wrong one. And then he asks you again. Tell him the truth and he acts really smug about it . . . and all the other witnesses think you're fucking around.
And don't get me started about your meeting with the AI that runs the Consortium. He not only knows your true origin, he gets upset if you don't know about the real world Consortium ARG. I mean, come on, that's a 1% reference at best.
Anyway, my next move is to replay the whole game, but always pick the "say nothing" response. Given how resistant this game has proven to respecting quality of life video game tropes like random NPCs being happy to lecture you about the basics of the setting (seriously, Rook 25 responded to a simple history question by taking an attitude hit and telling me to read the codex), it seems likely that being a "silent protagonist" is not going to win me any friends.
But that's a problem for the future. For now, I'm mostly concerned with teasing out the secrets of the Consortium universe. It's not going well. Having played through the game a second time, it's become clear to me that it is mostly a series of conversations, with some flexibility on the order, but only minimal cross-influence between them. I did see a whole new scene because I allowed a certain character to believe we were speaking confidentially. The first time through, I told him we were being monitored because I assumed the game would find another way to give me his information as a reward for being honest (though I now realize this isn't that sort of game). However, the additional scene wasn't particularly enlightening. I met with Knight 15 (don't ask me about the Consortium's rank system - everyone keeps yelling at me every time I try and get some clarification) before the traitor attacks, instead of just going directly into the confrontation.
However, that confrontation was short-circuited because I correctly guessed the traitor's identity and Rook 25 (again, don't ask) cornered her before she could hack the power armor and make it go berserk. I'd love to credit my amazing deductive skills for figuring out the answer to the game's central mystery, but honestly, I had no evidence and I just played a hunch - someone once told me that this character couldn't possibly be the traitor because of her backstory, and I was like, hmm, why would the game go out of its way to make her seem innocent when, in fact, there is no evidence against anybody?
I mean, there's probably evidence to be found somewhere in the game, but after two times through, I haven't seen any. Which is kind of the opposite of how a locked-room mystery is supposed to go. There should be too much evidence, and everyone should have a motive, and as the heat turns up on the investigation, they should turn on each other and attempt to convince the investigator that it was anyone but them. But Agatha Christie this is not. The crew of the Zenlil stayed loyal to each other, refused to believe any of them could be a murderer (one of them even doubted a murder had taken place), and consistently counseled me to just wait until we landed so the authorities could handle the matter.
Like I said, Consortium is not that kind of game. It seems to almost resent the fact that it's a story. The biggest culprit is the framing device. I guess I understand why it's there - if you want to establish a theme of choices and consequences, then the concept of multiple close-copy alternate dimensions is a tempting one to play around with. And if you're doing a many-worlds setting, then leaning on the fourth wall and saying that the real-world player is, in fact, simply watching from another, more distant dimension, and thus part of the game's story in a much more direct way than usual would seem like a fun extension of the same basic idea. However, as near as I can tell, the only reason this alternate dimesion stuff is included in the game is to make the player feel like an idiot.
It occasionally crops up in your dialogue options, but almost without fail, if you pick those options, the people around you will react negatively - either thinking that you're dicking around amid serious business or that you're purposefully being evasive, or that you're losing your grip on reality. Which would be fine if it only came up as a smart-ass dialogue option, but sometimes it's a major plot point. There's a guy who asks you your name, but that's not something you know, because everyone always calls you by your code name, Bishop 6. Try to dodge the question and he calls you out on it. And then he asks you again. Select the dialogue option where you give him a name, and it turns out to be the wrong one. And then he asks you again. Tell him the truth and he acts really smug about it . . . and all the other witnesses think you're fucking around.
And don't get me started about your meeting with the AI that runs the Consortium. He not only knows your true origin, he gets upset if you don't know about the real world Consortium ARG. I mean, come on, that's a 1% reference at best.
Anyway, my next move is to replay the whole game, but always pick the "say nothing" response. Given how resistant this game has proven to respecting quality of life video game tropes like random NPCs being happy to lecture you about the basics of the setting (seriously, Rook 25 responded to a simple history question by taking an attitude hit and telling me to read the codex), it seems likely that being a "silent protagonist" is not going to win me any friends.
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Consortium - 4/20 hours
I was worried about potentially spoiling the end of Consortium, but I'm not sure that's actually possible. There were events that happened, but putting them in the context of a narrative might be a bit difficult. The fact that you're playing a game in the world of the game is mentioned often enough that it feels important, but it's so confusing that I couldn't tell you why it's important.
The problem may be that Consortium is not a complete story. It is merely the first part of a trilogy. Plots are set up, but they're not resolved. Granted, I didn't solve the game's central mystery, so it's likely that some of this comes down to my incompetence, but the game ends on a cliffhanger. It tells you which of your decisions are significant, but nothing about their consequences. Presumably, they're waiting for game 3 to do that, but seeing as how game 2 is still in early access, I'm not expecting that to happen any time soon.
I should probably just learn to enjoy the texture of the experience. Appreciate the subtle differences in dialogue and context that come from making different decisions and befriending different characters. It would fit the game's intimate scale. It's set in a confined space, with only a dozen or so characters, and it's over in four hours. I should be expecting depth rather than breadth.
And who knows, maybe it's there, but the game flat-out tells you that it always ends the same way, with you falling out of an airplane in a sabotaged freefall suit, having failed to detect the second traitor in the organization. Can there really be enough variation in-between for the game to be satisfying on five different playthroughs? I'm skeptical.
It's not that I don't think there will be some significant differences in the story, it's just that you're given a detailed list of all the significant choices that might have branching consequences and while combinatorial explosion might mean that there are thousands of technically different playthroughs, the realities of making a game (or, for that matter, telling a story) mean that they should all be fairly close to each other in feel.
It remains to be seen how big an issue this is going to be. Even if I weren't doing this for the blog, I'd probably play Consortium at least 2 more times - once to see what happens in a totally nonlethal game and again to see what happens if I choose the "say nothing" option every time it becomes available. I also want to discover the identity of the traitor, purely for my own edification. Playthrough 4 is going to be the real test of this game. That's when I'll be moving outside my normal crpg patterns and start playing the game purely because it promises to be different.
The problem may be that Consortium is not a complete story. It is merely the first part of a trilogy. Plots are set up, but they're not resolved. Granted, I didn't solve the game's central mystery, so it's likely that some of this comes down to my incompetence, but the game ends on a cliffhanger. It tells you which of your decisions are significant, but nothing about their consequences. Presumably, they're waiting for game 3 to do that, but seeing as how game 2 is still in early access, I'm not expecting that to happen any time soon.
I should probably just learn to enjoy the texture of the experience. Appreciate the subtle differences in dialogue and context that come from making different decisions and befriending different characters. It would fit the game's intimate scale. It's set in a confined space, with only a dozen or so characters, and it's over in four hours. I should be expecting depth rather than breadth.
And who knows, maybe it's there, but the game flat-out tells you that it always ends the same way, with you falling out of an airplane in a sabotaged freefall suit, having failed to detect the second traitor in the organization. Can there really be enough variation in-between for the game to be satisfying on five different playthroughs? I'm skeptical.
It's not that I don't think there will be some significant differences in the story, it's just that you're given a detailed list of all the significant choices that might have branching consequences and while combinatorial explosion might mean that there are thousands of technically different playthroughs, the realities of making a game (or, for that matter, telling a story) mean that they should all be fairly close to each other in feel.
It remains to be seen how big an issue this is going to be. Even if I weren't doing this for the blog, I'd probably play Consortium at least 2 more times - once to see what happens in a totally nonlethal game and again to see what happens if I choose the "say nothing" option every time it becomes available. I also want to discover the identity of the traitor, purely for my own edification. Playthrough 4 is going to be the real test of this game. That's when I'll be moving outside my normal crpg patterns and start playing the game purely because it promises to be different.
Friday, February 2, 2018
Consortium - 2/20 hours
In any rpg, you're going to get a division between the action-filled combat parts and the more passive story sections, and usually, even the wordiest of games tends to rely much more on the former than the latter. Consortium, so far, appears to reverse the balance. It's hard to say at just 2 hours in, because these are often the most plot-heavy, but it appears that most of my time is going to be spent in conversation menus, attempting to choose the responses that unlock the potentially branching paths through the story.
For my first time through, I'm just going to play as intuitively and naturally as possible. Which may not be as easy as it seems. There is some weird stuff lurking in the corners of this game. Like at the beginning, where one of your fellow officers is telling you about your current mission and in the process dips into information about your character's backstory. I did what I was trained to do by any number of rpgs past - respond with ignorance in order to encourage the npc to deliver more exposition. But then the strangest thing happened, the character started to get really angry with me. At first, she accused me of messing with her, and then she became concerned that I was having a mental breakdown. She sent me to see the doctor and things got really weird.
As the doctor interrogated me about my symptoms, the conversation tree gave me the option to tell him that I was a character in a video game being controlled by a player in another dimension and that everything around me was simulated. A nearby witness begged me to stop with this foolishness, but the doctor believed me and eventually put me in a sci-fi scanning device, whereupon it was revealed that I had extremely atypical thought patterns, consistent with being mind controlled by a second, artificially implanted, personality.
I may not have paid enough attention to the Steam store description. I read the words "have developed a satellite (iDGi-1) capable of opening a digital rift through time and space" and kind of just assumed that they were describing the futuristic plane the game is set on. If I'd bothered to take in the sentences both immediately prior to and immediately following that one, I'd have realized that they were, in fact, referring to the game's framing device. The conceit is that this magical satellite is in our real world and that by playing the game, I am actually accessing this satellite and communicating with an alternate reality - the world of the game. Consortium actually takes place on a high-tech, but otherwise normal airplane, and not, as I originally thought, in some sort of time-traveling, dimension-hopping space plane.
Why the game needs this framing device, I can't say. Presumably it's going to have some kind of payoff, later on, but for now, despite having incontrovertible physical evidence that my character, Bishop 6 (a code name), has been compromised by an unknown third party, the Consortium has decided to let me keep doing my highly-sensitive, if vaguely defined, military/police troubleshooter job. Maybe it's just an in-joke, meant to make fun of idiots like myself that insist on staying to the perverse and nonsensical path of total ignorance, but if that's the case, why tout it as a selling point on the game's Steam page?
The practical upshot of this detour is that I am not completely lost about who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing. Someone's been murdered, and despite being in a confined space, with a limited number of people, nobody's a suspect and aside from assigning me to investigate, my superior officers in this secret(?) military(?) organization appear to be mostly content with waiting until the plane lands and having the professionals on the ground handle the investigation.
I think what I'm supposed to do is observe as much as I can, read the in-game lore documents, and then, because multiple playthroughs are explicitly canon, thanks to the game's framing device, use my knowldge from the first run to make better choices on subsequent runs. But if that's the case, I haven't quite gotten into the spirit of the thing yet. So far I'm playing as if I were a nameless detective with severe amnesia, bumbling my way through this investigation with zero law-enforcement instincts.
I'm hoping it will all make sense in the long run.
For my first time through, I'm just going to play as intuitively and naturally as possible. Which may not be as easy as it seems. There is some weird stuff lurking in the corners of this game. Like at the beginning, where one of your fellow officers is telling you about your current mission and in the process dips into information about your character's backstory. I did what I was trained to do by any number of rpgs past - respond with ignorance in order to encourage the npc to deliver more exposition. But then the strangest thing happened, the character started to get really angry with me. At first, she accused me of messing with her, and then she became concerned that I was having a mental breakdown. She sent me to see the doctor and things got really weird.
As the doctor interrogated me about my symptoms, the conversation tree gave me the option to tell him that I was a character in a video game being controlled by a player in another dimension and that everything around me was simulated. A nearby witness begged me to stop with this foolishness, but the doctor believed me and eventually put me in a sci-fi scanning device, whereupon it was revealed that I had extremely atypical thought patterns, consistent with being mind controlled by a second, artificially implanted, personality.
I may not have paid enough attention to the Steam store description. I read the words "have developed a satellite (iDGi-1) capable of opening a digital rift through time and space" and kind of just assumed that they were describing the futuristic plane the game is set on. If I'd bothered to take in the sentences both immediately prior to and immediately following that one, I'd have realized that they were, in fact, referring to the game's framing device. The conceit is that this magical satellite is in our real world and that by playing the game, I am actually accessing this satellite and communicating with an alternate reality - the world of the game. Consortium actually takes place on a high-tech, but otherwise normal airplane, and not, as I originally thought, in some sort of time-traveling, dimension-hopping space plane.
Why the game needs this framing device, I can't say. Presumably it's going to have some kind of payoff, later on, but for now, despite having incontrovertible physical evidence that my character, Bishop 6 (a code name), has been compromised by an unknown third party, the Consortium has decided to let me keep doing my highly-sensitive, if vaguely defined, military/police troubleshooter job. Maybe it's just an in-joke, meant to make fun of idiots like myself that insist on staying to the perverse and nonsensical path of total ignorance, but if that's the case, why tout it as a selling point on the game's Steam page?
The practical upshot of this detour is that I am not completely lost about who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing. Someone's been murdered, and despite being in a confined space, with a limited number of people, nobody's a suspect and aside from assigning me to investigate, my superior officers in this secret(?) military(?) organization appear to be mostly content with waiting until the plane lands and having the professionals on the ground handle the investigation.
I think what I'm supposed to do is observe as much as I can, read the in-game lore documents, and then, because multiple playthroughs are explicitly canon, thanks to the game's framing device, use my knowldge from the first run to make better choices on subsequent runs. But if that's the case, I haven't quite gotten into the spirit of the thing yet. So far I'm playing as if I were a nameless detective with severe amnesia, bumbling my way through this investigation with zero law-enforcement instincts.
I'm hoping it will all make sense in the long run.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Consortium - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
Game One of the iDGi-1 Trilogy.
A murder mystery, on a plane, in the future.
CONSORTIUM could be described as a first person science-fiction role-playing experience. It also can be played like an adventure game.
The story begins in our world - the "real world" - where we here at Interdimensional Games have developed a satellite (iDGi-1) capable of opening a digital rift through time and space. Anyone with an internet connection can travel through this rift and awaken within an alternate dimension from our own - the "game world" - in the year 2042.
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
This is one of those games I got for free. Sometimes people on Steam give away free games (apparently) and there used to be a time when I would just jump on every such opportunity. Consortium was towards the end of that period, where I knew I had to be more discerning, but was not yet inoculated against the allure of "free."
Expectations and Prior Experience
A murder mystery on a sci-fi space plane sounds like a cool and unique idea for an rpg. I am anticipating a lot of juicy commentary here. My main worry is that the reviews say it's short and that you're meant to play through multiple times to explore different paths. If that's true, there should be 20 hours worth of content here, but the last time I played a game with 20 hours of content spread out over a dozen different playthroughs was Long Live the Queen. And while I liked the game, I admit to going a bit stir-crazy there towards the end.
Still, it will be nice to have a narrative to follow again. I'm hoping it will be enough to keep me obsessed, so I can knock this one out in 3 or 4 days. But even if it's not, it probably won't be bad enough to push me behind my schedule.
Famous last words, I know, but what can I say, I'm feeling like an optimist today.
Game One of the iDGi-1 Trilogy.
A murder mystery, on a plane, in the future.
CONSORTIUM could be described as a first person science-fiction role-playing experience. It also can be played like an adventure game.
The story begins in our world - the "real world" - where we here at Interdimensional Games have developed a satellite (iDGi-1) capable of opening a digital rift through time and space. Anyone with an internet connection can travel through this rift and awaken within an alternate dimension from our own - the "game world" - in the year 2042.
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
This is one of those games I got for free. Sometimes people on Steam give away free games (apparently) and there used to be a time when I would just jump on every such opportunity. Consortium was towards the end of that period, where I knew I had to be more discerning, but was not yet inoculated against the allure of "free."
Expectations and Prior Experience
A murder mystery on a sci-fi space plane sounds like a cool and unique idea for an rpg. I am anticipating a lot of juicy commentary here. My main worry is that the reviews say it's short and that you're meant to play through multiple times to explore different paths. If that's true, there should be 20 hours worth of content here, but the last time I played a game with 20 hours of content spread out over a dozen different playthroughs was Long Live the Queen. And while I liked the game, I admit to going a bit stir-crazy there towards the end.
Still, it will be nice to have a narrative to follow again. I'm hoping it will be enough to keep me obsessed, so I can knock this one out in 3 or 4 days. But even if it's not, it probably won't be bad enough to push me behind my schedule.
Famous last words, I know, but what can I say, I'm feeling like an optimist today.
Stronghold 2 - 20/20 hours
I played 20 hours of Stellaris over two of the last three days. So in theory, Stronghold 2 shouldn't be that difficult. I think the problem is that I've exhausted my interest in the series. That's not a commentary on any of the individual games, it's just that real-time battle tactics have never been something I've cared a great deal about, and while I can usually get through RTS games by focusing on the economy, 60 hours is a long time to spend trying to force a game into a more congenial genre.
It's not really fair to the game, though. If I had done the sensible thing and only bought the single most appealing entry to the Stronghold series (which seems to be Stronghold Legends, from my superficial perusal of their Steam pages), I'd have undoubtedly finished the game with some kind of backhanded comment like, "assaulting and defending castles isn't really my thing, but I like that I got to build something practical and test it out, and RTS games aren't too bad as an occasional change of pace."
Because that has been my honest opinion of every Stronghold game I've played so far . . . taken individually. But I'm not playing them individually. I'm playing them as a series, and it's getting to the point where I can scarcely look at the screen without radiating 100 megawatt "I don't care" beams out of my eyeballs.
I'm going to take some advice I got from the rpg.net forum and play two games before returning for Stronghold Legends, though I'm not sure how viable this is going to be as a long term strategy. I'm getting to the point where my only remaining games are ones that I've put off playing, for one reason or another.
Out of the 23 games I have left, I'd say that there are five that I'm genuinely looking forward to, and have been saving so that my last few months aren't a total death march. Then there are four that are on the list purely because I have a friend I play weekly co-op games with. Those games have been fun, but I'm dreading playing them solo (like, seriously, how am I supposed to do 20 hours of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes). Six of my remaining games I got for free. They were interesting enough that they were able to tempt me for a price of zero dollars, but were not necessarily things I'd buy on my own. Three games look decent, but are probably too short to play for 20 hours. One game I bought purely because I thought the title was funny. Three of them are Stronghold games. And the last one is Age of Wonders III, a member of a series I actively disliked, but which I'm hoping is modern enough to downplay the things that annoyed me about its predecessors.
I've got to have hope, though. I've got exactly 20 weeks until my self-imposed deadline. That still gives me six days per game. I figure I'll probably pick up a couple of days with some of the rpgs and grand strategy games. I just have to keep my fingers crossed that it's more than I lose with the ones I'm starting to dread. . .
(Sorry, Stronghold 2, you deserve better than that, but there shouldn't have been six of you.)
It's not really fair to the game, though. If I had done the sensible thing and only bought the single most appealing entry to the Stronghold series (which seems to be Stronghold Legends, from my superficial perusal of their Steam pages), I'd have undoubtedly finished the game with some kind of backhanded comment like, "assaulting and defending castles isn't really my thing, but I like that I got to build something practical and test it out, and RTS games aren't too bad as an occasional change of pace."
Because that has been my honest opinion of every Stronghold game I've played so far . . . taken individually. But I'm not playing them individually. I'm playing them as a series, and it's getting to the point where I can scarcely look at the screen without radiating 100 megawatt "I don't care" beams out of my eyeballs.
I'm going to take some advice I got from the rpg.net forum and play two games before returning for Stronghold Legends, though I'm not sure how viable this is going to be as a long term strategy. I'm getting to the point where my only remaining games are ones that I've put off playing, for one reason or another.
Out of the 23 games I have left, I'd say that there are five that I'm genuinely looking forward to, and have been saving so that my last few months aren't a total death march. Then there are four that are on the list purely because I have a friend I play weekly co-op games with. Those games have been fun, but I'm dreading playing them solo (like, seriously, how am I supposed to do 20 hours of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes). Six of my remaining games I got for free. They were interesting enough that they were able to tempt me for a price of zero dollars, but were not necessarily things I'd buy on my own. Three games look decent, but are probably too short to play for 20 hours. One game I bought purely because I thought the title was funny. Three of them are Stronghold games. And the last one is Age of Wonders III, a member of a series I actively disliked, but which I'm hoping is modern enough to downplay the things that annoyed me about its predecessors.
I've got to have hope, though. I've got exactly 20 weeks until my self-imposed deadline. That still gives me six days per game. I figure I'll probably pick up a couple of days with some of the rpgs and grand strategy games. I just have to keep my fingers crossed that it's more than I lose with the ones I'm starting to dread. . .
(Sorry, Stronghold 2, you deserve better than that, but there shouldn't have been six of you.)
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