Atlas

My PC is still going strong, and I've primarily been a PC guy for a good ten years now. I did end up getting a PS4 and I don't regret it, but I actually didn't end up playing many exclusives on it. I could afford a new console, but there isn't anything that I've seen that's made me really want to jump onboard the new generation from the start and I've usually been a later adopter (got my 360 Elite in 2007, and got my PS4 sometime in 2015/16 because I thought RDR2 would be console-exclusive). I haven't even been playing many games on my Switch lately, it's almost exclusively been PC games this year.

The only thing that's made me think about a console is I've been thinking about signing up for Game Pass, which might end up being a good excuse to get a Series S (not sure there's any point getting a Series X because I don't have a TV that can do 4K). Them announcing Horizon: Forbidden West as also launching on PS4 did a lot to kill my interest in getting a PS5.

I think the best way to approach gaming culture, or any fandom really, is the same way that we should approach uncontacted tribes in the deep Amazon or Borneo; with a healthy, detached, anthropologic curiosity.

I'm super excited for her, and if her next step is gaming/comedy/whatever in a public forum I'm sure I'll follow her new career path.

But selfishly, for the site, this is a bit of a heartbreak for me. Abby has not only been a breath of fresh air, but she's been involved in some of my favourite series and moments on the site in the past 3-4 years. I love Clue Crew and her chemistry with Alex, and I loved the Sims 4 content so much that I actually got the game and dived into it myself. I love that she actually got St. Vincent to play Fortnite with her! I even watched her play Red Dead Revolver, which was not a particularly fun game to watch someone stream, but it was Abby so I watched it. She's basically just been one big laugh riot.

I was out of the loop when Austin was around and only found out how awesome he is when he'd gone on to other things. When Patrick left, it felt like it was the right time for him to move to something different with him moving to Illinois. When Dan left...well, I had a love/hate relationship with Dan and I don't want to start an argument or anything, but I didn't feel like I'd miss him being gone. But Abby? Man, I'm pretty bummed out right now.

Admission: I've been bouncing off this game pretty hard the past couple of days.

I'm coming to terms with the fact that some of the core design decisions of CK3 have pushed the game in a direction of play that I struggle with, but which loads of people like - intrigue, crisis, drama, chaos. It's a design philosophy that makes the game a better anecdote generator, but a worse empire-building game. I have tried, on numerous attempts, to play this game as an empire-building simulator, and failed. And by "failed", I don't mean I got an actual Game Over because I controlled no land; I mean "failed" because I abandoned the save.

I'm bad at picking up the pieces when things go wrong. I'm bad at dealing with being unlucky. The succession laws in the early game are maddening to me, and I feel like I'm banging my head against problems that don't have solutions - they actually do have solutions, but they often involve becoming a tyrant, a murdering psychopath, or both, and that's just not how I've been wanting to play the game.

This is a "me" problem, and it's come up before. When I find a game like this that I really love, I sometimes find myself finding one line, one path that I like to take and following it, and bailing early when things go wrong. It happened with Civ 5; Egypt was my favourite civ, and I always built a tall civilisation that built tons of Wonders - if someone beat me to Great Library, I was done. It happened in Stellaris - pacifist expansionist, try to expand quickly with minimal investment in military and quit if bottle-necked or invaded. And it's happening with CK3 - I want to try all the different paths and possibilities because I know there's fun to be had, but I got into a pattern with CK2 of just starting in Ireland and doing the usual build-a-big-Britannia-empire thing, and I'm tempted to do it with CK3 except it's harder and more annoying because Insular Christianity, the succession chaos, and the OP Vikings in the 867 start.

I love this game, I really do. I've been extremely depressed and very much not sleeping well recently, so maybe I'm just very tired. But I think I'll take a break for a bit. I had already taken a pretty extended break to power through Horizon: Zero Dawn, so maybe I need another one or two of those. I might install DOOM Eternal, or Dishonored 2, or play more Sims 4, or maybe dive back into Mount & Blade 2 and see how much it's changed since launch. But trust me, I will be back.

Final note: one of my favourite starts in CK2 was the last independent Zoroastrian duchy in Persia, which was Dihistan, and rebuilding the Persian Empire of antiquity and becoming the Saoshyant. I don't know that this path is possible in CK3, because in CK2 that start had special troops that give you an early military advantage - in the new game, you're on your own, and you're surrounded by enemies that want to swallow you up. But I wanted to try it...so I used debug mode to start with 5000 gold and a ruler with 20 in all stats. And I had fun for a bit, until I ran into the same issues I'd been running into with succession laws and realm management. It was also a bit too easy, so I guess chalk that one up as an overcorrection.

If you want to try something wacky and have some fun, try cheating once or twice. It'll never be as satisfying as doing it the hard way - in CK2 I played the Persia start on Ironman, and got the achievement for controlling Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina because my empire was colossal, and that ranks highly in my most satisfying and rewarding gaming accomplishments - but it's a laugh to lean into the chaos and cheat your way into some improbable bullshit.

Almost all collectibles are bad.

I've been playing Horizon Zero Dawn on PC and I absolutely love the game, loved it in 2017 and love it now. But the collectibles really add nothing to the game except an excuse to spend a bit more time in the world doing something mindless. And don't get me wrong, I've been collecting metal flowers and finding the Banuk figurines, because I do enjoy spending time in the world. But at least Horizon sells you maps that show you where they are, so you don't have to put much effort in to get your relatively meagre in-game rewards.

Apologies for incoming mountain of text, but it's 12:45am and I saw Tenet this evening so I'm too exhausted to edit it.

I have played Crusader Kings II on Steam for nearly 1,400 hours - the only game I have logged more time with is Sid Meier's Civilization V. It's one of my all-time favourite games, and I wrote a blog post on this 'ere website back in 2012 - it was called "Why CKII is the GOTY, and Why You're All Assholes". That was needlessly hyperbolic and inflammatory, obviously, as I did also really love XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but I thought it was a weak year in a lot of ways and thought The Walking Dead Telltale series was quite overrated. I stuck with CKII through the expansions to gameplay, coming back to it for another hundred hours or so every 6-12 months. I adore CKII, maybe as much as it's possible for me to adore a game.

So, CK3 then. My expectations weren't spectacularly high, because I've got a habit of disliking sequels to some of my most played games (Civ 5 is a masterpiece, and Civ 6 is toilets, see also for XCOM-XCOM2). That said, I think I liked Imperator Rome a lot more than some Paradox fans did, even though I only ever had fun playing as Rome and following the linear, obvious path set out by the game. It came nowhere close to matching the time I sunk into Stellaris, which was about 500 hours, let alone CKII.

I've played 15 hours of CK3 so far, following on from the tutorial and trying to build a realm starting in Ireland, which has always been considered CK "easy mode" but to be honest was always one of my favourite go-to ways to play CKII. I got up to the early 13th century after starting in 1066.

I think the game is phenomenal, and I think it also needs some pretty major re-balancing, and some issues definitely need to be ironed out. It's crazy how different the pace and progression of the game feels compared to CKII, and the powers that unlocked by climbing the tech tree are much more impactful than before. I think a lot of the major mechanical changes are positive. I like that Stress encourages you to roleplay by punishing you for taking actions that are against your character's nature. I think using Renown as a means of providing dynasty-boosting buffs is kinda silly but also pretty awesome.

My biggest pet peeve, and I know I'm not alone in this, is how hard they've made it to keep a realm together with succession laws. Partition is historically quite accurate, and creates a bunch of dynamic challenges, but the way I played CK2 was to find the quickest and easiest way to get rid of Gavelkind and get all of my titles, or at least the biggest ones, onto my favourite heir. I just never found Gavelkind fun or interesting, and the fact that it's not only the default starting point for pretty much every realm but that it requires a LOT of investment in certain ideas/fascinations to change, is a real pain in the arse.

And in the game I've been playing, I've run into an issue that I don't know how to resolve, because I don't know if it's a bug or not. I'm the King of Ireland and King of Scotland. Both kingdoms have partial partition elective tanistry succession, which means the lords of each kingdom vote for who should become king and I lose some small, not terribly important titles on succession. What's happened is that I want my son to inherit, because he's got good stats and he has TWO sons who are geniuses, but the game won't let him inherit my titles. I choose him as my elected heir for both kingdoms and my vassals like him, and the game says that he's in-line to inherit all my important titles - and then I actually die (at age 85 after ruling for 60 years BTW - thanks to the Body focus lifestyle perk tree for that), and another relative gets Ireland and my son gets Scotland. My main goal has been to create a unified Britannia empire and this event basically destroys 50% of the progress I've made, which I'm pretty pissed off about. And despite me trying numerous different things and the game still saying my son is going to inherit everything, the same thing happens - my realm is split again.

Smaller stuff: I think the rewards for the lifestyle trees need major rebalancing, as some of them feel totally game-changing and some just feel really minor. In theory, I like that the game incentivises giving council positions to powerful vassals, and punishing you for not doing so, but in reality once your realm reaches a certain size you'll end up with way too many vassals who want a seat at the council and only four seats to go round. Unless you give multiple duchy-level titles to the same vassal, which is a recipe for a civil war once you have a falling out with said vassal.

Religion, at least Christianity starting in 1066, seems extremely volatile. We had two Crusades, both of which were won by Christians and resulted in members of my dynasty becoming kings, but they didn't really achieve much long-term gain. Heresies appear often and are very powerful, and you don't have the same tools to fight them that you did in CK2. Several major rulers of kingdoms in Christian Europe converted to heresies without much negative consequence.

And I know it's a relatively small thing, but playing as a merchant republic was one of my favourite ways to play CK2, and I'm a little bummed that it's not in the base version of CK3. I'm sure they'll add it later, and there are so many ways to play the game at launch that it's hard to feel too sore about it.

I know my list of complaints was longer than my positives, but that's mostly because of the problem I've encountered in my main game. I think there's huge potential for them to build on this game to the point where it becomes just as big and just as special as CK2, but I think their starting point is pretty great, especially with the improvements they've made to accessibility and how clean the presentation is.

It will almost certainly be my GOTY, even though I still need to play DOOM Eternal and I really loved Super Mega Baseball 3. But it's Crusader Kings, and it's just so much my jam it's not even funny.

No Man's Sky. I played it years after launch and absolutely loved it, so I guess it's kind of a cheat but don't have a better answer.

Crusader Kings II is always the answer, as there is huge potential for playing as non-white characters/dynasties. Start a tiny nation in West Africa, or Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea), and set out on quest to take over whole continent, then turn your sights on Europe. Re-create the Maurya Empire in India, or roleplay as Genghis Khan, or bring back the Persian Empire of antiquity. Stop the Reconquista in Iberia before it really gets going and secure the peninsula as a Muslim fortress in southwest Europe.

My ethnic makeup is English, Polish, Irish, Welsh, and a tiny bit Norwegian, so I'm as white as a bed sheet. But it would be cool if more games had BAME characters (I don't know if people know the term BAME outside of the UK, but it stands for Black Asian Minority Ethnic, and is used as a generic term to refer to non-white people), in the same way it would be cool if there were fewer protagonists who are white, thirty-something males. I like to use games that have character creation tools to create BAME characters, gives me a chance to think outside the box and enhance roleplay a bit - is a black man more likely to support the cause of the Railroad in Fallout 4, for example?

I think I might be running out of stuff to keep me motivated to play Sims 4...but that's after 225 ish hours. I could buy more expansions, or try a bunch of mods, but I feel like if I stopped now I would feel satisfied and would find it really easy to recommend to anyone who is interested or used to play the Sims. Yes, I did try it because of Abby.

Also I started playing Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. I don't have a fancy HOTAS flight stick or anything - just playing with a PS4 controller on PC. I've never really gotten into flying sims, and this is definitely more of an action game and less of a sim, but I've enjoyed it quite a bit. The story touches on some interesting ideas, even if part of the premise is spectacularly dumb. Some of the mission design is a bit rote and clunky, but I feel like these kinds of action games have never solved that problem. It looks great, it feels fast and dynamic, and getting better upgrades and more powerful planes feels really good.

I also completed my first full campaign in season mode in Super Mega Baseball 3. I played as the Jacks and on 62-64 Ego, I went 37-11, then lost only two games in the playoffs en route to the championship. It's so much fun. I get emotionally invested in the action and flow of the game like nothing else. I don't feel like franchise is an essential feature - I'm curious about the experience of tanking and using spare cash to upgrade players, but that would probably involve losing a lot of games and I find losing is often a really frustrating experience - few sports make losing feel as soul-crushing as baseball, where you just can't get an out or string some hits together in an inning.

Anyway, SMB3 is my current GOTY. Haven't gotten round to DOOM Eternal yet, and Crusader Kings III and the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn are around the corner, so it may not stay there. But it's my favourite sports game in recent years, by a wide margin, and sports games that don't focus on MP and collecting stupid digital cards have always been my jam.

Nah.

I'm sure I'll get one at some point, just like this past gen where I eventually got a PS4 and ended up enjoying it quite a bit. But I don't see any reason to drop money on day one unless you're the zeitgest/FOMO kind, which I'm certainly not at this point.

I'm pretty sure I would feel exactly the same way without the pandemic.