Back in White Orchard, I had no interest whatsoever in Gwent. I don't really like digital card games in general; representing game concepts as cards feels bland, to me. But in the doldrums of Witcher 3's levels 5-10, when I was putting off some story quests and everything else was too high-level for me -- Gwent was something to do.

Thus began several hours of Gwenting: learning how to build a good deck, discovering surprising and disruptive mechanics, following quests for competitive play, and eventually, hunting down every last Gwent-able NPC.

At first, getting into Gwent was a little frustrating: losing because my cards were bad, and being unable to get better cards ... because I was losing. Buying cards from vendors is expensive, in the early-game economy, and there just aren't that many opponents that the starter deck can compete with. I watched innkeepers and merchants place 10-strength cards and hero cards, use a Commander's Horn to double their strength, use cards with the Muster ability to collect their brethren; the numbers were just impossible for me to match.

But through quests and determination (and selling some monster organs to afford more cards), I scraped my way up the Gwent ladder. And what started as a way of earning experience points became a surprisingly deep minigame all its own. I still remember the first time I saw the Scorch card, and learned that placing strong cards early could make them vulnerable.

Personally, I'm still very fond of my Northern Realms deck. (I really like Foltest's ability to clear weather, and using the spy cards to build up a huge hand.) But all of my decks are powerhouses now. My only regret is that I've won at Gwent so much, that I can no longer win random cards; I already have all of them.

All of that said, Gwent still feels more like a diversion than a standalone game to me. It's something for Geralt to do inbetween monster-hunting and fetch-questing. Which is why I was excited to learn that Gwent: The Witcher Card Game is supposed to be getting some story-driven content, when it finally leaves beta.

Progress: Let's just say that I finished the Gwent tournament, and then collected all the main game's cards, well before I'd saved Ciri.

I briefly mentioned, last time, that Witcher 3 still has a few kinks in it. Take this scene, in which some unfortunate Nilfgaardian soldiers find themselves trapped in a pathfinding black hole:

The last few story missions were definitely a bit weird, but ultimately everything resolved in a really satisfying and fun-to-watch way. And yet, as much as I could go on about the fulfilling send-off, and the pathos of seeing my choices impact Geralt's story, and the intrigue of how things might have turned out differently...

I'd rather jump right back in. There are still plenty of sidequests to investigate, contracts to chase, and treasure hunts to track down. (Not to mention the Hearts of Stone story!)

Better than: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, in terms of mechanical fun.
... but: absolutely better than Breath of the Wild in terms of narrative interest, character development, and world engagement.

Though it's considerably more playable than its predecessors, Witcher 3 still has its share of oddities and frustrations. Like the dramatic disparity between how many skills you can invest points into (80) and how many can be activated at once (12). And how the Alchemy menu doesn't allow you to buy materials directly from its crafting screen, even though armor and weapon crafting does, and the menus are identical.

Foremost in my mind is how incredibly picky the game can be about context-specific actions. Being able to interact with an object requires both that Geralt is roughly facing it, and that the camera is somewhat centered on it; and so many times, Geralt's wide turning radius has resulted in me awkwardly trying to dance into the right position to press the 'A' button. It can be ... maddening.

But - and I feel I'm repeating myself, here - these inconveniences melt away in the face of the game's character and intrigue. The writing is so charmingly fitting, that it never fails to draw me into its world. Even when that world isn't exactly on my side.

Here's a story I recently relayed by text message:

So I did a couple quests this morning. One of them was killing the ghosts haunting that lighthouse island [Eldberg], it turned out to be a curse because the lighthouse keeper collaborated with some thieves to turn out the light, make ships wreck, and collect the loot. I let the keeper go but put some fear of Freya in him.

It was a contract, so I went back to town to report it to the contract giver. He was a friendly warrior who had previously told some xenophobic Skelligers to stop harassing me in the pub. Those same guys came back and wanted to fight the contract giver. So I joined him and fought the two guys.

They brought out swords and killed the nice dude (nothing I could do to stop it). So I killed the shit out of them. Then their dad was outside, apparently they were his only two sons, and he ordered me to stand trial for murdering his kids.

Went to trial by the "Madman" jarl. He kind-of bought my self-defense story, sentenced me to death for murder, but allowed me to pay off the life debt by doing him a favor. The jarl's son was off on a dumb quest to prove his manliness (I guess to be king) and the jarl knew he would fuck it up without my help.

So I went to help him, he asked why and I didn't say anything about his dad, figuring he would be too proud to accept that help. We went into a cave of "dreams" which legend said would confront us with our greatest fears. (Actually everyone took a bunch of hallucinogens.) Sure enough his greatest fear was his father thinking he was weak, so we fought a hallucination of his father.

Then we saw Geralt's fear which was the king of the Wild Hunt. Before I could kill him, Geralt passed out. He woke up on the ground and saw the jarl's son glaring down at him.

The son said a messenger had arrived while I was out, saying that I had been sent by his father. Since I told the son that I was just here for money (instead of repaying a debt to his father), he thought I was trying to steal from him. He gave me the money but told me to get lost and not talk to their people again.

So I saved the island from wraiths, some nordic hicks smack-talked me in a bar, and now their whole clan hates me.

Progress: Level 26, swept through the Isles, collecting some contracts.

Geralt, being a man of considerable influence, has many decisions to make throughout his journey. And as I've progressed in that journey, these decisions have come to resemble some of my least favorite parts of BioWare's games, Telltale's games, et al. More and more, I'm finding that the choice descriptions aren't really what I expected.

To wit, in my last few exchanges of words, options which I thought were cunning and sneaky ... immediately triggered open conflict and resulted in piles of bodies at my feet. Whoops.

But, Witcher 3 considerably softens the impact of this problem by just being fun and interesting either way. Sometimes I'll wonder about how things might have gone; but only one time did I bother looking that up online, afterward. (The time with the magic talking tree, which I was pretty sure was evil.)

When Geralt starts saying the opposite of what I meant to say, and an NPC gets all mad about it -- I'm just like, well, get ploughed I guess. And then he does.

I think it's fair to say that this game gets away with more than it might've, due to the strength of its narrative craftsmanship. I don't even mind seeing repeated NPC models, and hearing the same background voice actor, from time to time. The quality of that voice acting, and the thematic heft of their writing, is consistently effective at immersing me in their world.

Even beyond that baseline immersion, the events and characters in the game's main quests have been particularly thrilling. Witcher 3's plot structure is pretty damn smart: The high-level goal is simple and succinct, and following its trail continually pulls in other subplots, which have their own breadcrumbs to follow and backstories to pull from. Not only are the subplots more-than-sufficiently intriguing on their own; they also frequently refer back to the main story, keeping the whole scale of the plot visible.

I think it's the best attempt I've seen yet at telling a compelling story in an open world. Compare to, say, Skyrim which partitioned each of its storylines into a neat little package; preventing them from interfering with one another, but also limiting the strength of any one story. Or Batman: Arkham City which bet most of its chips on a rollercoaster ride of a main story, such that any diversions from that - including the story's own diversions, like the random appearance of a Mr. Freeze or a Ra's al-Ghul - just felt like they got in the way. Or Breath of the Wild which avoided storytelling awkwardness by not really telling a story at all.

Witcher 3 uses that simple, heirarchical plot structure to pull off a compelling narrative and make its diversions feel well-paced. This is a great approach to writing, and I hope other open world games are taking notice of it.

Progress: Level 14, investigating a heist.

In its first few hours, Witcher 3 felt "good," but not spectacular. Not a revelatory experience that overtook my expectations, like Breath of the Wild; more like a better-written (and better-voiced) iteration on Skyrim.

A meaningful improvement, certainly, over Witcher 2. Combat is a lot more accessible, as it sticks to simple and intuitive attacks from the start, easing very slowly into things like bombs and oils. The menus, particularly for managing character inventory -- so much better than before. And maybe the most important enhancement, given my last moments with the second game, is frequent auto-saves. (I also haven't encountered any crashes yet, fingers crossed.)

But I wasn't blown away. Despite being an open-world design, it didn't feel like I had all that much freedom: the starting area of White Orchard wasn't all that big, and as I trekked around Velen and Novigrad, all the quests I picked up were way, way above my level. It seemed like the only way forward was to continue the main story.

I wanted to do some exploring first, though. So I continued wandering the map, trying to find side-quests and activities that a lowly level 5 could pull off. And as I hopped from town to town, gathering quests, collecting intel, and Gwent-ing quite a bit, the hooks sank in.

What I initially observed as "better-written than Skyrim" turned into much more than that: a comprehensive approach to world-building, steeped in gritty fantasy. Talking to cynical peasants, wandering through dingy towns, stumbling across burned caravans, finding a note about a treasure heist next to a thief's rotting corpse... there is so much detail in Witcher 3's world, and it isn't just for the sake of aesthetic beauty, nor just to put checkboxes on a map. All of this content builds up an intimidating and immersive theme, with craftsmanship that makes Skyrim look, by comparison, bare and mechanical.

I still wonder if scaling enemy strength (like The Elder Scrolls) wouldn't make the map feel more open and free. At least in Witcher 3's first several hours. But having gotten over that hurdle, now, I have no doubt about the quality of this open world, and the joy of exploring it.

And that's all without saying anything about the incredibly engaging and intriguing main storyline.

Nor about Gwent, which may be the sole topic of a future post.

Progress: Level 9, helped a witch track an elf through a cave.

My misgivings about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel centered around its creative shortcomings and ineffectiveness: the new features weren't engaging, the new enemies weren't fun to fight, and the "new" story and characters weren't exciting or surprising. Claptastic Voyage suffers in the same ways. While it attempts to mix things up with a cool TRON aesthetic, it crumbles under the weight of nonsensical missions and grindy encounters.

The story's focus on Claptrap is pretty regrettable, similar to games like Jazzpunk and Matt Hazard -- while aiming to lampoon annoying tropes, it ends up succumbing to them. Not just because there are too many Claptraps and they all talk too much, but because of the world elements inspired by Claptrap. I mean, pop-up ads! Obstacles that suddenly rise from the floor as you walk. Flying robots that whizz around and obscure your vision. Stuff like this is just brazenly un-fun.

And while these elements may have been meant to punctuate the flow of the story, that flow is just ... awful. The main quest should be simple, but is stretched out by a series of contrivances; every time it feels almost over, some new, seemingly-random plot device appears to steal the objective away. It doesn't help that so many of the levels are either generic glowy cubes, or rehashes of areas from previous Borderlands games.

(One level, near the end, did make really impressive use of gravity-defying geometry and boost pads. That part was great. The rest really wasn't.)

An unfortunate consequence of this uninteresting game world is that my partner and I were utterly uncompelled to do its side-quests. And this, in turn, meant that we were underleveled as the campaign moved on. For the most part, this wasn't a problem; enemies with flashing red skulls were still no match for us.

The final boss, though, was a tiring chore with an unreasonable health bar. ... and then it turned out, that wasn't the final boss. The "real" final boss was an even bigger bullet-sponge, and its attacks destroyed us almost instantaneously. (Fun anecdote: as Wilhelm, my partner used the Termination Protocols skill to die, revive, and immediately die again back-to-back for about a full minute.)

We could have gone back to do an hour or two of sidequests, and probably stand a much better chance in that fight. But neither of us cared enough to keep playing.

Claptastic Voyage is basically competent, and - with the exception of that final boss - about as enjoyable as the middling, mediocre parts of other Borderlands games. But its ambitions above that, few as they are, fall.

Better than: Borderlands 2: Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt
Not as good as: Borderlands 2: Sir Hammerlock vs. the Son of Crawmerax
I probably shouldn't get my hopes up for the next Borderlands: but I really want someone to come up with a blend of action and humor that lives up to Borderlands 2.

Progress: Got to the ECLIPSE boss, and died a whole lot.

It's been about eight-and-a-half years since my last go at a Final Fantasy, and some parts of FF XV looked kind-of appealing to me: like driving a car around an open world, and fully real-time action combat.

The demo makes a pretty poor case for it, though. What passing interest I might have had is dead and buried, now.

Combat is kind of a mess. It has shades of tactical precision, in being able to parry some enemy attacks, and "blindside" enemies by hitting them from behind; but the mechanics feel skewered by the optional lock-on. You can choose to lock aim onto a target, and be unable to see most of your surroundings - like other foes about to surprise-attack you - or you can stick with free movement and aiming, lose the ability to teleport strike, and swing wide due to the awkward camera. (And, maybe I missed it, but there didn't seem to be any way to switch my lock-on target once the game arbitrarily selected one for me.)

Plus, since your AI teammates reposition themselves liberally, the enemy's facing direction is effectively random. I had fun using the teleport strike, but everything else about combat just felt chaotic and sloppy. (For better or worse, the encounters in the demo were so easy that these problems never made it difficult.)

The open world is kind of a mess, too. It's certainly pretty-looking, but actionable elements are incredibly sparse, and traversing it is a chore. The car can't go offroad! (Invisible walls stop you!) And walking/running between points of interest takes forever. It seems like your entourage's banter is supposed to make these stretches less boring, but all they ever had to say was filler text; none of it was interesting to me.

And the story and pacing - not that I expected much - is ... kind of a mess. You've got your ambiguously evil "empire" and obvious foreshadowing of war, you've got your ancient prophecy and royal lineage of magic, you've got your fish-out-of-water protagonist and his childhood friend(s) guiding him along; it's a smattering of various clichés, plus the flat characterization and stilted dialog (and awkward voice acting) you'd expect of a Japanese RPG from last decade. And of course, the cutscene-heavy exposition that has come to define this franchise.

Frankly, in terms of "sort of realistic but also wacky and fantastical" worlds, Super Mario Odyssey's New Donk City was better-executed than the locales and "humans" I saw in the Final Fantasy XV demo.

The emptiness and boredom of the open world is what disappointed me the most. My fondest memories of older Final Fantasies are largely around exploring their world maps, and being enticed by far-off sights or hunting for hidden secrets; the map I got had to explore here just felt like butter scraped over too much bread.

Progress: Finished the demo.

Back in, wow, January?, I had already resolved to skip over a lot of Witcher 2's gameplay - the combat, basically - in order to enjoy the story. So, after my last post, I strolled around the town of Flotsam looking for sidequests and colorful NPC chatter.

Then the game crashed. And when I brought it back up, almost an hour of my progress was lost. There were no autosaves from when I'd crafted and equipped items, entered and left buildings, or acquired and made progress in quests. Ugh.

Over the following few months, I told myself that I'd muster up the patience to try again. But I never did. I recalled that Skyrim also screwed me out of progress a handful of times, such that its quick-save became a reflex -- but Skyrim was actually fun to play. Witcher 2 just wasn't. The fun was in seeing larger world events unfold, and in hearing Geralt give some NPC a dressing-down; all the rest of the game just felt like a chore between story beats.

So I watched a movie of the game's cinematics, instead. (And, props to this movie maker for some impressive direction and editing, particularly in the mid-game sidequest montage.)

As for watching Geralt's story play out, well... "enthralling" isn't exactly the right word, as the movie's cinematic chops suffered a bit from clipping bugs, and from wandering NPCs pulling accidental photobombs. And I never got completely comfortable with the fantasy slang that Iorveth kept spewing out.

But the game's narrative strengths were still plainly evident, especially how it blended swords and sorcery with, not just political intrigue (Game of Thrones has that cornered) -- but the more mundane, day-to-day evils of human behavior. No one in this story was purely heroic, and few were purely villainous; their shades of gray were demonstrated quite well, and their characters often made quite relatable.

I'm glad I got to watch that story unfold, not just as preparation for Witcher 3, but also for its own sake. CD Projekt deserves to be proud of the narrative world-building that they've pulled off. And I hope that the next game keeps me from relying on recorded playthroughs to experience that.

Better than: The Witcher: Enhanced Edition, basically better than Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (which was way more functional but just not interesting at all).
Not as good as: Deus Ex: Human Revolution
From the minutes I've played so far: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is at least not as bad as its predecessor in terms of bugginess and incomprehensible controls.

Only a month or two after saying they would have a release date - and, you know, a couple years after their initial estimate - Shaq Fu 2 is finally dated. I guess I can appreciate that, after this project's tumultuous history, they really wanted to be sure of the date before announcing it.

And ... wow. I like the over-the-top irreverence angle, a'la Marlow Briggs -- but this gameplay looks like a lot of bland, undercooked shit.

Sure, it's only the first level, but I still have to wonder: will all of Shaq's moves be restricted to 2D targeting, like beat-em-ups from 20 years ago? Will the screen always look so empty, with the camera zoomed out to show unremarkable environment art? Will the whole story be relayed by animated cutscenes and disassociated, throwaway voice-overs? And is that coin pickup art and sound from some royalty-free asset pack?

That said, there are aspects of this game that do seem impressive. Somebody got Shaquille O'Neal to record a flavor line saying "I hate crates!"

I think that this could be a good game to drink my way through.

Dull, repetitive, boring, camera problems. Well, that's a shame.

From watching gameplay footage, it looks like - although trash-clearing and civilian-rescuing technically constitute "gameplay" - Extinction took a pretty direct route from proof-of-concept to retail release. Reviews agree that the ogre fights become redundant quickly, and that the game's world and characters simply aren't compelling. Not much meat on these bones.

I still like the premise, the elevator pitch of Extinction -- if it was surrounded by more robust mechanics and world-building, like a Shadow of Mordor or Breath of the Wild. Maybe a sequel or a spiritual successor will push the needle further.