Month: March 2019

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Shadow Wars

I finished Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Apparently, when they removed the cash shop, they also removed the grind from the epilogue. What I expected to be a multi-week slog was instead a few quests, and I could have completed it in a night had I not been pacing myself for a marathon.

The downside of the epilogue content is stacking up the pace-breaking captain messages. Enemy captains announce themselves when they see you, and you get a message every time an allied or enemy captain dies by anyone’s hand. By “message,” I don’t mean a bit of text. I mean stopping the game for 5-20 seconds for an unskippable cut scene. In the fortress assaults and defenses, there might be more than a dozen captains. Nothing breaks your rhythm in a game like pausing every 10-30 seconds for 5-20 seconds during big fight scenes. It is usually not that bad, but once heads start rolling, they keep rolling and keep pausing the game.

The endgame is basically the answer to “I wish I could keep doing this forever.” The fundamental gameplay of the series is good, so if you just want to keep killing orcs and captains, you will never run out of orcs and captains. I have had a great many games where I have kept playing just because I enjoyed playing, and I very well might pop into Shadow of War again. I expect to play a bit further and try the expansion content.

The game as a whole is fun. It is mixed, but it is fun. The pacing is a bit off, although I don’t know how much of that is the original design versus what has been added and removed since release. Removing the cash shop was a big thing, and it let me buy the game. I was not interested in buying a single-player game with lootboxes.

: Zubon

Although really, how often do we play our MMOs as single-player games?

Difficulty and Luck

Playing a bit more Sentinels and looking in on the community, I find that some of the heroes and villains are extremely swingy and can go from steamroller to steamrolled based on a lucky draw, especially at higher difficulties. Cosmic Omnitron can potentially defeat the heroes during initial setup, Citizen Dawn can potentially prevent the players from ever having any cards to play (not a technical first turn loss, but a guaranteed loss from setup), and Wager Master can potentially win or lose on the first turn.

Some people like the higher difficulty and say it feels like a more satisfying win when you overcome the opponent. I look at that, and it feels more like luck that you had a chance to win at all. You can make the right decisions and improve your odds, but even at their base difficulty, villains like Cosmic Omnitron and Akash’bhuta can get a lucky draw and play 10 cards in a turn. Granted, that can effectively be an enrage timer, in that you need to defeat the villain before that roll of the dice comes up, but it still makes winning and losing more of a roll of the dice than I usually like in my strategy games.

I am using Sentinels of the Multiverse as my example here, but it is far from the only game where the challenging content has a significant luck-based factor on whether it is “challenging” or “impossible” (or, if luck goes the other way, “accidentally trivial”). That’s not a satisfying challenge for me.

: Zubon

Sentinels of the Multiverse

I have been playing more Sentinels of the Multiverse and digging it. I have been playing the solo, computer version, so I cannot speak to the original, intended experience, but this has been entertaining.

I was initially down on the game, as the link suggests. The base game has some content, but most of it comes from its various expansions, so you start the game and immediately see that 90+% of the content is behind a paywall. It’s not even a bad monetization system. The base game is inexpensive, and the additional content is available both in discounted packs and in very small units if you want only a subset. But it is not a good welcome to the game.

After being down on it, I played through all the original content at all difficulty levels, because I started having fun after giving it a fair shake. It is entertaining. You get superheroes, you beat up supervillains. The difficulty is not that high, except when it is; different villains and environments have different difficulty ratings, and some of them synergize, and some heroes work better or worse for each. Not knowing going in, you basically have a crapshoot and may end up with a team missing something really important for that villain, or you may steamroll. With some foreknowledge of what is in each deck, you can definitely steamroll even the higher difficulties, although ridiculously perverse pulls from the villain deck are possible (and counterable, if you have the perfect cards in hand).

Lately, I have been unlocking the variant characters. You can do this for free with a click, but I have been going through the story challenges. Some of those are simple, like “put Bunker in all three of his modes during one game.” Others can be extremely particular, like defeating a villain with a specific card with another card in play after using two other specific cards in a certain order, or recursively demanding. I was listing what you need to do to unlock the Freedom Five, but it was so long I got tired in the first phase of it. You need to unlock ten characters and intentionally lose at least four games, and then you can set up a particular lengthy fight. Basically, you are recreating part of the backstory of the game, and over time the developers have been defining “recreate” more narrowly or using more complex bits of story. Engineering the right circumstances can be an interesting juggling act as you need the fight to go long enough to cause X, but you cannot cause Y, and hero A must be incapacitated but hero B cannot and maybe C needs to deal the final damage.

And then you can stop that nonsense and go back to an old fashioned slugfest, which is the base fun of the game. You get to play superheroes, have some neat abilities, and fight villains with neat abilities that you can counter or just brute force through.

An acquaintance was enthusiastic about the original version of this game a long time ago. I probably should have listened then. This is not the best cooperative game I have seen, but it has been fun enough for me to want to buy more of it and play with the other heroes, villains, and environments. And the latest stuff has team and villain modes, which I have not touched yet, so there are still multiverses to visit.

: Zubon

5000 Achievements

A year and a half ago, I hit 4,000 achievements on Steam. Sometime last month, I hit 5,000, because today I am at 5,015.

I presume that I played some games with a lot of achievements, because that works out to 1.8 achievements/day. As much as I pursue achievements, that seems like a lot.

I have no deep thoughts here. Just, “wow, another 1,000 achievements.”

: Zubon

Edit: 6,002 achievements on May 7, 2020.
Edit: 7,008 achievements on March 6, 2021.
Edit: 8,003 achievements on October 25, 2021.
Edit: 9,007 achievements on May 25, 2022.
Edit: 10,004 achievements on July 31, 2023.
Edit: 11,037 achievements on December 26, 2023. … at least 200 of which disappeared a few weeks later. Maybe a game was de-listed. And back to 11,000 even on February 27, 2024.
Edit: 12,083 achievements on November 19, 2024. A game added achievements and my number shot up by 139 overnight.
Edit: 13,009 achievements on August 12, 2025. That feels unearned because one game has spat out almost 500 achievements in less than 10 hours of play.