More random, not-at-all-deep thoughts

I got tired of futzing around with other things so I jumped back into Pillars of Eternity II this week. I continue to be impressed with it--the game has improved on the systems from the original, including multiclassing and character advancement as well as the characters themselves. Even the crew members of your ship are distinct personalities.

Also I experimented with streaming from the Xbone to my PC again last night. I should have pretty decent speeds, but wireless streaming in my house is spotty for some reason. I fooled around with Rock Band 4 first, but the computer didn't recognize any peripherals so that was a bit pointless. I think it would be kinda cool to be able to do that, but, oh well. Next I loaded Fable II. That worked reasonably well. Despite being a fairly straightforward kind of RPG, after a certain point (and I found this to be true of Fable: The Lost Chapters on PC when I played it years ago, as well) the game just sort-of seems to say, "Okay, you figure out where to go to move the main quest forward, and in the interim, if you're just faffing about, what the hell do I care?" Not in a Skyrim, hey-look-over-there-at-that-shiny-thing kind of way. In a well-you-need-to-go-here-but-I'm-not-telling-you-how-to-get-there kind of way.

On the actual Xbone, I've been fooling around with Need for Speed: Payback and, to a lesser, extent, Diablo III: Eternal Edition, both of which I picked up on sale over BF weekend. The Need for Speed game is pretty fun; I haven't played anything in that series in a long time, so I was surprised at the weird hybridization between Forza Horizon-type open-world racing and a Fast-and-Furious-style story mode. I actually think the game would have worked much better without the former. People have talked for years about how a lot of games have open worlds just for the sake of having that bullet on the back of the box, metaphorically speaking (these days), but I think that's really true of this game. It didn't need to be a story-driven racing adventure unnaturally grafted onto an open-world sim.

Diablo III does seem to work pretty well with a controller on consoles, which is what I had read in numerous places. I took a Necromancer through the first few bits of the story, which was enough Diablo for me for a while. A little bit goes a long way.

Hm. I also loaded World of Warcraft on my computer over the weekend on a whim. I created a Night Elf, um, mage of some sort, maybe. I've already forgotten. I did a kill x of y quest for questgiver z and that was about all of the WoW I was up for. Perhaps I have a short attention span in my old age, but I'm not sure I see why that experience is so addictive for some people.