Very Itch-eresting, Vol. 1

Valve, the gaming corporation behind the PC gaming platform Steam, recently announced that Steam Greenlight, the current method for non-traditionally published games to make their way onto Steam, will soon be phased out in favor of a new system, called Steam Direct. Rather than the complicated and obtuse method of combining votes, money gathered via crowdfunding, apparent quality, and a host of other reasons which Valve somehow used to determine what did or did not make it onto Steam, they will instead simply charge a fee. If you pay, you get on. The actual amount of the fee has yet to be determined, but Valve says they are asking developers for their thoughts and have received recommendations ranging from 200 dollars, twice as much as it took to put your game onto Steam Greenlight, to 5000 dollars.

5000 dollars, it should go without saying, is a lot of money, and would most likely prevent many smaller developing studios, and especially solo developers, from being able to get onto Steam. Some don't see this as a problem, however: if the game is worthy of being on Steam, the largest and most visible PC gaming platform, then 5000 dollars should be easy to recoup. If they don't happen to have a spare 5000 dollars just lying around, well there are other places to sell their games, such as perennial weird-game favorite, Itch.io.

A Lament for Persona 5, Which I Should Be Playing Right Now

Ah, Persona. How I've missed you these many years. Like most, I first cut my teeth on Persona 3, a fantastic JRPG that was just as much social simulator as dungeon crawler. The story, about students fighting the Shadow monsters which appear during a secret 25th hour, The Dark Hour, hooked me easily when I first played it my freshmen year of high school. It's sequel, Persona 4, remains a favorite of mine, containing my favorite cast of characters in any game and having many quality-of-life improvements over it's predecessor. It's been over 8 years since we were last graced with a game in the franchise, but at long last we've arrived at the release of Persona 5!

Waiting For The Fun

I've been spending a fair bit of my free time (or at least, small slivers of free time between other activities) playing Nintendo's latest mobile offering, Fire Emblem: Heroes. It's a perfectly serviceable title, offering bite-sized tactics gameplay in a simplified package. I've been thinking two things in my time with the game: One, I should probably try to finally beat Fire Emblem: Awakening. Two, free-to-play games sure rely on waiting a lot, huh?

The game has your typical F2P mechanic of a stamina meter. Instead of allowing you to play for as long as you'd like, every fight you undertake will cost a variable amount of stamina from your stamina meter. Capping out at 50 points, your stamina meter will refill at a rate of 1 point every 5 minutes, or a little over 4 hours to go from empty to full. Needless to say, this puts a hamper on prolonged play sessions, but the game isn't too hampered by this. The battles in the game are incredibly quick, swapping out the occasionally over half-hour long battles with huge maps and armies in typical titles and replacing them with 4 on (typically) 4 short-form skirmishes. It's been incredibly easy to simply hop in during a short bit of down time, play a quick fight, then put the game away for a bit while you do something else. In all my time playing over the last couple of days I've only been unable to continue due to lack of stamina once. Where I can see it becoming a problem is with trying to train up new units, preventing you from playing multiple fights to get experience. It's annoying, but hardly gamebreaking.

The whole thing has made me think of how waiting gets used in other titles. For example, I've also been playing a lot of the MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV. If you encounter interactive spots during quests, activating them will cause a short bar to appear, which needs to fill before you can continue. I'm not entirely certain why these appear (I assume they are either to allow time for the game to communicate with the servers or to ensure you're not being attacked by monsters), but the short little waits can add up to a bit of annoyance if you're in a rush. On the longer side, you need to wait for a party to be formed every time you join the Duty Finder, the "Looking For Group" feature in FFXIV which matches you with other players for dungeons, boss fights, and raids. The game leans heavily on the typical MMO class trinity of DPS (damage-dealer), Tank (damage-taker), and Healer, and parties found through the Duty Finder must have a particular makeup of classes. If you’re playing a Tank, a type of class which tend to be less common, the wait for a party to be formed is often instantaneous. If you play the more common DPS class...well, I typically sit around for 5-10 minutes before getting into a dungeon if I play when a lot of people are online, and I’ve sat around for as long as 30 minutes.

I try not to hold this against the developer. The shorter waits are typically only around a second long, even if I'm not entirely certain of their purpose. The longer waits are a necessary evil, given how FFXIV is structured and the nature of the classes: Everyone's playing DPS, so it's harder to find a group that needs one. But if you're catching up on old content, or just happen to be playing the game a lot, those short 1-second long add up to a pretty big annoyance. Meanwhile, those longer waits are a drag in any case, but they're especially bad if you're trying to run through dungeons multiple times in a row for special currencies or items.

These waits, difficult to avoid as they may be, end up dragging down what is otherwise a fun and relatively fast-paced MMO. But I've seen long waits like this work in other games. In fact, I'd argue it's one of the few things that worked in last year's No Man's Sky.

No Man's Sky is a space exploration and survival game, tasking players with making their way to the center of a massive galaxy. The game takes great pride in it's realistically sized planets and galaxies, even taking into account how long travel between planets would be. Depending on how far you need to go, it was often a couple of minutes from one planet to the next. A couple of minutes of nothing but a cockpit view of space, hurtling towards a planet that will probably have very little of note on it.

I remember when the game first came out, I played it on livestream so my friends could watch. One of them was absolutely astonished that so much nothing could be in the game. They were adamant that a game with this much time 'wasted' was no good. They were right about the game being no good, but in my opinion this time spent waiting was actually pretty cool. The developers, Hello Games, were going for a realistic view of space travel, and "a lot of nothing for a long time" is probably pretty accurate to what it would be like to actually travel throughout the galaxy and over entire planets. It made me feel more like I was really sitting there in my spaceship, hopping from planet to planet hoping to find what I needed to keep heading towards the center.

My most vivid memory of the game was when I spent a long while, something like 2 or 3 hours, on a single shitty planet with nothing on it. The whole thing was hotter than hell, around 80 or 90 degrees Celsius, hot enough to make prolonged time out of my ship dangerous. Worse, it had frequent dust storms that would cause massive heat spikes, upwards of 300 degrees Celsius. At times like this, my only respite was to hop into my ship, which I guess had the universe’s greatest air conditioning, and wait it out.

It was boring, and time consuming, but I felt immersed in those moments. Me sitting on my couch, turning on a podcast to pass the time, was not all that dissimilar to my character in the game, feet up on the dashboard, listening to something to pass the time while a storm rages outside. It was waiting, sure; I was doing nothing in this game I paid 60 dollars for, yeah; and considering the inexplicably long amount of time I was on this shithole of a planet I didn't end up with much to show but a couple of inventory slots and a new ship, both of which I could have gotten on any other planet. I honestly, truly don't have a good explanation for why I stuck around. But it felt really cool, y'know? Like I was a real explorer, dealing with the bullshit of a terrible place that I had to put up with for a bit. That little shitty planet made me feel more like a proper space adventurer than anything else I've played before. It was the only time playing No Man's Sky where I felt like the game had achieved anything close to its lofty goals.

When it’s done like this, I can defend waiting for the “real game” to continue. When a game isn’t forcing me to wait to try and encourage more purchases, or because there aren’t enough people running a dungeon, it’s possible for waiting to be hugely beneficial. I won’t deny it takes a certain frame of mind: if I wasn’t still on the game-just-came-out high with No Man’s Sky, I might not have had the patience. But those moments of peace, of taking in the view while I waited out a storm or flew across the galaxy, were my favorite part of the game. Not every game will benefit from forced waiting. But for putting you in a space, and taking in the sights, there’s easily potential for it to be well worth the wait.

Final Fantasy XIV and Anti-Anxiety Repetition

Check the supply and provisioning log. What do I need to craft today? What do I need to gather? Get a list of the things I need.

I don't respond to stress particularly well. I get angry, I get frustrated, I need to walk away even when it feels like the last thing I should be doing. The best solution, I've found, is to find something quick and repetitive to do to take my mind off for a bit. And as I've found recently, MMOs are the perfect fit.

Crafting is easy, but annoyingly luck based. Start the crafting: Activate Great Strides now, so you can take advantage of any possible condition changes; Use Basic Synthesis to increase the progress; pay attention to the durability so I don't waste this stuff; raise high quality chance as much as I can, and hope for the best once it's done.

Once everything is crafted, time to move on to gathering. Look up the location of the requested botany and fishing items. Go to where the botany item is, and gather 10, always 10. Figure out the right bait and location for the fish I need to gather, then cast my line. Then fail, and cast it again. Then fail again, and cast it again. The fishing always takes a while.

My poison of choice, for a while now, has been Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I'm well into endgame, at the moment, and eagerly await the upcoming expansion pack Stormblood. But right now, world being as it is, I'm thankful for a place to go with plenty to do when I need it.

All the crafting and gathering is done. Turn it in to the Storm Sergeant,  he'll give me experience and currency. Time to do work for the Beast Tribes; the Vundu, bird people; the Vath, bug people; and Moogles. I'm getting close to having the quest lines for all three finished, and once I do I can get a new quest line and get a cool new dance. It's nice to have a goal to work towards.

The variety of things available in the game, as far as repetitive stuff goes, is impressive. Maybe it's nothing special for people who have sunk time into MMOs before, but as a relative noobie it can be overwhelming sometimes. Every 18 hours, I have to check in with my retainers (NPCs who can hold items, sell items on the market, and do odd jobs for you) and ensure they're still working on ventures, along with searching for treasure maps that can contain valuable crafting materials and currency. Every day, I have new Supply and Provisioning missions, where I need to craft and gather items for one of the three PVP factions; I don't participate in PVP at all, but joining a faction is required for the story and being a part has other benefits. I can also do Beast Tribe quests every day, which can provide experience or endgame currency, or do Duty Roulette, which will have me running a dungeon for bonus money and experience. And every week, the game’s Challenge Log resets, which has tons of different objectives within which can provide experience, money, and some of the special currencies such as faction seals and Gold Saucer Points.

With the Beast Tribe quests finished, I run a few dungeons; one of the roulettes picks from the two most recently added dungeons, but for some reason more people seem to be running the one that isn't required for the story. And in the roulette of the rest of the dungeons, the Aetherochemical Research Facility is almost always where you end up: it gives the most Allagan Tomestones of Lore, a currency which is probably going to be phased out once the new expansion hits, but is still valuable right now. Running the dungeons is a little rote, but sometimes the other people you get grouped with are fun to talk to.

In all honesty, it can take me hours to complete everything on my plate any given day, if I even bother to try finishing everything. But sometimes I need a few hours. Sometimes I only need like 30 minutes. Sometimes just hearing a familiar tune, a calming melody, is enough to put me in the right state of mind. To be able to face a tough day, as days tend to be lately. Just something to stop anxiety and panic attacks.

The dungeons are finished, and with it my entire daily routine is exhausted. But there's still a ton of classes and jobs I could level up, and I still need to finish the Scholasticate questline, and I still need to get my Relic weapon up to date, and finish all of the Alexander raids, and the new Dun Scaith raid, and I just saw an advertisement for a player-run club that I could check out as a goof, and...

I used to hate this stuff: it was repetitive, it was boring, it was what weird people did when they ran out of real stuff to do in the game. But now, when I need something simple and easy to do, something I can lean back on, I appreciate this stuff as more than fluff. It's the same, over and over, and it's the exact relaxation I need.