You know you've been there.
The perfect storm where it just seems like everything is conspiring
against you.
This is a gaming blog so I'm not talking about your lousy
boss or the irritation of your significant other...
No, it's about how you thought you'd be gaming till dawn but
instead ended up flipping through seasons of Community.
In case you haven't guessed, I just had one of those.
It's a special kind of masochism that makes a gamer spend
hours beating their head against the same wall and so it was with me.
The game I'm currently spending the most time with is Path of Exile. Like most players I have a few characters I
play and like anything else some are more entertaining than others. I enjoy a challenge but I don't enjoy stupid.
I've mentioned before my irritation with games that get unnecessarily difficult just to keep things interesting. Which is exactly why I spent
last night watching a lot of TV instead of gaming.
It started with Path of Exile and my level 52 Witch. She's my original character and the one
that's responsible for most of my time in the game. Unfortunately as I've gained more experience it's
become obvious that she's the equivalent of artillery in a game that favors infantry. Yes, she can do some nifty tricks but only if
she can survive long enough to light them off.
That's why the skill tree for the Witch is so heavy on
something called "minions."
Minions are the equivalent of an army on call and I've found that on
more than one occasion they've been the difference between survival and
defeat. Spawning a half dozen skeleton
warriors or zombies usually provides enough buffer for my witch to make the
fireworks happen.
But not last night.
No, last night I spent over an hour in Act 3's Crematorium
map running for my virtual life. This
map is the player's third encounter with one of the two antagonists in the
game, Piety. Unfortunately as you
advance in the game (especially in cruel mode) so too do the enemies you face. In some cases exponentially.
In case you don't know, death in the cruel
game mode not only brings the agony of defeat but the annoyance of losing 15
percent of your experience.
Long story short, Piety was eventually defeated but not
before I'd lost all the experience gained from battling through baddies to get
to her. OK, I know I signed up for this
but for some reason last night was worse than most. After 15 deaths I gave up. We went from challenging to stupid and I'd
had enough.
So I was still in a gaming mood and thought I'd give Star Trek Online another shot. Star Trek Online is a game that I'd spent a
few hundred hours in about 2 years ago.
At the time I found it a captivating and sometimes challenging RPG set
in a universe I dearly loved.
Recently it came to my attention that after the passing of
Leonard Nimoy the game developers had modified a few sections of the game as a
memorial. Initially I was playing via
Steam but on returning to the game after a 2 year hiatus, I found an 11GB
update waiting.
That's fine once but
apparently Cryptic ( the developer) wasn't keeping the game updated on Steam. That meant every time I launched it I was
forced to download the entire 11GB update again which was doing my 250GB data
cap no favors. So Steam was out at least as far as Star Trek Online was concerned.
I was determined to get a video of the in game memorials so
I decided to reinstall the game via the developers own service, Arc, which
solved my duplicate download problem.
Finally I could run the game.
Except for one thing.
I'd forgotten just how bad the user interface was. The game itself is ambitious and the most
immersive Star Trek gaming experience I've had but the learning curve is
steep.
Where I was battling fleets of Borg cubes and Romulans with
reckless abandon when I first played the game now I found myself battling the
UI just to get around.
Which brings us to last night. I had beamed my character down to New
Romulus and was exploring the map. I was
finding movement difficult and inventory management almost impossible but I was
managing.
At least I thought I was up to the point where I was
attacked by enemies and found my weapons not responding to my repeated mashing
of the FIRE key. I remember being able
to quickly use items from my inventory bar when I was regularly playing this
game. This time, however, it took a
number of mouse clicks. Not ideal when
in the middle of a heated battle with a Tholian Commander.
I used to be proficient in that game but something's gone
awry here. Control was never that great
to start with but it seems to have gotten worse over the past few years. Assuming you can dig through layers of
interface to find your key mappings, there's a very good chance it's all for
naught as the game is likely to ignore them.
After having my level 50 Vice Admiral knocked on his Vulcan
posterior a few dozen times it was evident that I just needed to stop beating
my head against the wall.
Another hour, some abuse of the furniture and I was
done. We'd again gone from challenging
to stupid. So stupid in fact that I
uninstalled Star Trek Online and it's ARC launcher.
Two games, two failures, one broken computer desk. Time to quit...
Thus ending the game night and beginning of couch potato
night.
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