What a good month.

The weather started getting shitty, which was actually kind of nice because it gave me a good excuse to stay inside and do some things. Andromeda took up a lot of my time. It quickly became my favorite open world game to date. I love exploring that universe so much. So many interesting things to find and even more to just look at, wondering what it would be like to explore the galaxy yourself. This is a game that resonates with me to my core. That announcement from NASA, the plan the put people on Mars by 2033, it makes me so excited and it also makes me hate myself I wasn't born 100 years later. I love to travel, but visiting different planets? I would probably instantly perish from not being able to comprehend how great of a time I would be having.

Andromeda

Andromeda managed to capture planetary exploration better than any game ever has. It was also a good reminder how infinity isn't the thing that makes space exploration so appealing to me (looking at you No Man's Sky), but rather the sense of things and what is placed in them. There are only a handful of games that manage to swallow up all of my time and make me skip three hours of sleep. Andromeda is one of those. It also helps that the gameplay is pretty fantastic. Right from the get go until the very end. At least on Insanity, I am assuming playing below it is just as boring as it always was. So much build variety and switching builds on the fly. It's better than it has ever been. Even early combat encounters can yield great results that make you feel good.

It is unfortunate that many of the characters beyond the core squad members are a bit underdeveloped. There are a couple of great sideline characters that are instantly classic ME characters, but the bulk of them are somewhat dull information hubs. They have more to say than past ME characters, but it's just a bit uninspired. What No Man's Sky is to exploration, is what most side-characters in Andromeda are to character interaction. Yes, you can claim to have a lot of it, but it's just not that interesting.

But luckily, there is still a lot of cool character interaction too (Vidal, you wonderful bastard). Most of the loyalty missions are also great, with a few among them that are instantly at the top of the board for me. I don't think a game ever made me laugh as much as Liam's loyalty mission did. It fits well with the character too and it was one of those moments that made you understand that character a lot better retroactively.

While I have finished it, I am not nearly done with Andromeda. I imagine I will finish it many times. Apart from the general characters, it is quite easily my favorite Mass Effect game so far. While not needing it to get there, that multiplayer being better than it ever was certainly is a big plus for me also.

Un'Goro in Hearthstone

The newest Hearthstone expansion is easily the best expansion they have ever made. It changed things up, making many decks top tier and more importantly, it made playing the game a ton of fun. All the new quests are so much fun to play with. Unfortunately, they are all Legendary status, so Un'Goro is also easily the worst Hearthstone expansion so far, in the sense that it costs insane amounts of gold, dust or real money to play around with more than one or two decks. Luckily, I had tons of dust saved up so I was able to craft everything and still have plenty of Dust left over.

So far, my favorite deck is probably the Paladin quest deck as I figured out a pretty fun and cool way to complete the quest. I also really enjoy the Hunter quest and had good fun with the Druid and Warlock quests as well (and I hate the Rogue quest. I am not crafting it out of spite. You Rogue quest guys are evil).

Fast & Furious 8

No, it's not called Fate of the Furious here. For some reason. I am actually very curious what that reason is. Perhaps they perceive non-native English speaking countries to not understand the goof in that title? I guess it doesn't matter. What does matter is that those movies keep being awesome. They are exactly what they need to be and not a shred more or less. Great, enjoyable action with funny performances and a pretty easy/standard storyline, but pulling it off extremely well. The only minor nitpicky thing I have to say about it is that they overplayed the whole Statham/baby scene. The bit with the baby music was hilarious, but they could've left it at that. They revisited that same thing like two or three more times as that scene played out.

But so much good there though. Some pretty decent performances from Mr. Vin. Nice locals, relatable characters, nice cars, good humor, just a good movie all round.

XCOM 2 and Building a Mod

XCOM 2 is slowly creeping up to be my favorite game of all time. Besides the core game being amazing, the modding community has been so active in catering to every type of player. While I ultimately came to the conclusion that Long War 2 is really not my thing (because I think it is bad design to steer the player away from the core of what makes your game fun: tactical combat), there have been many, many mods that I love using. Most of them make the game quite a bit harder, by adding different variations of certain enemies. Or even simple ones that augment existing enemies. One of my favorites is a mod that gives Berserkers the Sustain perk, meaning you can only reduce them to one hitpoint at most over the course of a single turn. Using some .ini magic and increasing their health even further, they are fearsome beasts now, where they used to be quite easy to deal with in vanilla.

Over time, I started getting bored with the vanilla classes. I tried some mods that added new ones, but never quite liked any of them enough to keep using them. So, I decided to take my time and create a mod of my own. I started making a new soldier class. I'm not going to lie, I wanted to quit within an hour of getting started. It is ridiculously hard to code. I had never done it before. It took hours and hours to create my first, extremely basic, custom ability (meaning an ability that is not in the game by default). But now, I am almost done with my mod. It is not one class, but I have created six entirely new classes for the game.

Release me from this nightmare!

For experienced programmers, this probably sounds like nothing. But for me, it is a major achievement. I never quite did hold it against developers for not getting things done, but now I have a whole new found respect for them. The amount of effort it takes to just alter an ability so it does something else, is an insane undertaking. Heck, even understanding what the hell I'm even looking at already took more time than I care to admit. I am not exaggerating, I was working on some abilities that took me 16 hours to finally get working, over the course of multiple days. The conflicts that arose from it, not knowing where I made an error made me want to punch Vin Diesel's baby in the face so goddamn hard. Every time I had a working build, the next ability messed things up again. It doesn't help that I have no experience in coding whatsoever and apparently I also do not have any hidden talent towards it. I made so many dumb mistakes... but ultimately, I have a working build now that is pretty much feature complete, having many new custom abilities. I'm just playing through the game now to see about balancing it.

If you are still playing XCOM 2, you can give my mod a try in a few days when it is done. The purpose of these new classes is that they are quite a bit more powerful than the vanilla ones to accommodate mods that make the game significantly harder. Alternatively, you could play one difficulty level higher than you are used to doing.

Also, I have decided to create three more mods. One revamps the Psi-Soldier, creating two entirely new Psi-Soldier classes. The second one is a MEC-mod. Creating at least two new MEC-classes, possibly more depending on how much creativity I have towards MEC-specific abilities. The last is a custom XCOM 2 overhaul, creating a new difficulty above Legend. I will make several tweaks to the way the meta-game plays out. For instance, I plan on making every Guerrilla Ops mission able to be completed (no longer having to choose between one of three), but they expire relatively close to each other, so you have to have many more capable soldiers than you are used to. Any Dark Events that slip through your fingers will be permanent, so unless you want to face Venom Rounds wielding ADVENT for the rest of the game, preparation will be key on your part.