Sunday Funday (14/01/2024) (Patreon)

(Yes, I know it's already Monday, leave me be)

How do you like this new format for caption previews? Looks a bit sleeker on the newsletter, I think.

The reception to the elf thing was surprisingly positive, so I would like to take a formal stab at it. I'll try to release the first chapter this month, and we'll see where we go from there. I would like to give the CYOA format a shot, so y'all can help me guide the story, too.

The tentative title is Fiendish Forced Fertilization Fiasco, the tale of Seraphina (Seri for short), a half-elf with a childhood dream: to study at the kingdom's most prestigious magic school. Her only problem is, well, a complete ineptitude at anything magical.

Seri's mana reserves are pitiful, she doesn't resonate with any element in particular, and even the simplest incantations manage to elude her. Somehow, despite all that, she was accepted!

A short lived victory, however: after only a few weeks on campus, she manages to break the seal of a powerful demon, getting cursed in the process and subsequently kicked out. Can anything else go wrong for poor Seri? Well, you'll have to find out later!

I've come to a terrible realization this week: I actually kind of like Genshin Impact.

Yes, crucify me, I deserve to pay for my crimes, but now that I've got a decent selection of units, building teams and tackling combat challenges is actually really fun and engaging. It's a shame about the whole, you know, *gestures vaguely at everything else*.

If you've had any contact with live service games, or Games as a Service, or whatever they're calling it nowadays, you probably know what I'm talking about: the game is fun, but there's all those little things in there to stall things out, or to grab hold of players for just a while longer, or to try to force you to come back to the game with certain regularity.

I remember really enjoying Forza Horizon 5, I sunk my teeth deep into it back when I had the disposable income for Game Pass, and it was great. It was a shame that a huge selection of cars were locked behind weekly challenges that you never knew when would become available. In fact, one of the cars in my wishlist, the AE86 Trueno, was the last weekly reward I got before I stopped playing. No hard feelings, FFXIV Endwalker came out the following week (and I stopped paying for Game Pass).

I've also played quite a bit of Back 4 Blood, the "spiritual successor" to Left 4 Dead. Compared to L4D2, it was lacking in gameplay, characters, story, enemy AI, well, basically everything. But it was sorta fun with friends. Unfortunately, perks for characters were locked behind battle pass-like systems where you had to buy a bunch of crap you didn't care about to finally get upgrades for the characters you wanted (that weren't listed in game, of course, I had to check a wiki). I ended up not bringing any friends to play, even though it was on Game Pass, because I couldn't justify "hey, it really sucks during the first five or six hours, but once you get actually fun perks and upgrades, it's alright!".

It really sucks that designing games this way became a science. Make a good game, then make it worse, fine-tune it to make it worse enough to be good but cause attrition and tempt people to grind things out, keep coming back or worse: make them open their wallets. Maybe I'm just having an "old man yelling at cloud" moment, but it sure is annoying.

Anyway, sorry for the long rant, just had to get that off my chest. See y'all next week!