eggmas / death stalks at every turn

egg! egg! egg!!!

Feeling overtaxed by my own social/gaming schedule right now, aka a problem entirely of my own making. Today is THE FIRST DAY OF NOTN WOOOOO. But also, I have raid from 1-4. Then nap. Then in the evening, we’re playing the hottest new game of the year, V Rising.

To back up slightly: A few days ago, HGR posted his year-end Steam review in Discord with the tagline “Fuck you for this, newbie.” Two of his six top genres were “automation” and “open world survival craft.” That’s not even a coherent genre name, just a bunch of words mashed together.

“You joined Palworld!” said newbie. “That was not me!”

newbie then posted his own year-end review, which mysteriously did not feature either genre (despite his untold hours in Valheim and Factorio). However, he did have the “dwarf” genre listed.

“Literally dwarf,” said Dante.

“Go smelt some ingots, bro,” said HGR.

Anyway, on Friday evening, we all decided to impulse buy V Rising, a vampire-themed “open world survival craft” game. There are no dwarves, but you can smelt ingots.

So as you can see, I just want to farm egg (and scry other people’s hatches, and see who would look good with the new apparel, and chat about the event, etc., etc.) but most of my day is booked solid. I should just chill. It’s fine, the fest is two weeks long, there will still be plenty of eggs tomorrow.

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Raid-wise, we’re finishing up the Eden raid cycle with Kan. We beat Shadowkeeper today. Good times. To my immense relief, I did not have to personally rotate anything in my head. I remember ONE time I had to rotate ONE thing in my head (Classical Concepts 2) and it was the worst mechanic ever.

Now we’re on to “he’s so cool” Fatebreaker. “This is my OC, do not steal,” said numbers as the opening cutscene played. Actually, isn’t this canon? I’m a bit fuzzy on the Eden plot, but I think we’re literally fighting Ryne’s Thancred OC.

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In other gaming news, I’m not enjoying V Rising’s combat. Partly it’s a skill issue, partly it’s an actual game issue. Melee feels bad against bosses because I’m not good enough to read the boss’s tells and react in time to dodge, meaning I get killed super fast. This is definitely a skill issue. But also it feels like enemies are just plain faster than the player most of the time. I often run from enemies (to dodge melee attacks) and they just catch up to me and melee me regardless. Like, numbers and Dante are Elden bros and leagues above me in skill level and they complain about this too.

So I’ve switched to ranged. But ranged also feels bad because there’s no run-and-gun in this game. When you fire a shot, you’re animation locked into standing still for a second, which generally gets me hit by something. If I focus on survival, I live longer, but then my uptime is shit. As a ranged character I expect full uptime insofar as my aim is accurate (which it often is not). I still haven’t found a proper middle ground between playing defensive (and doing zero damage, thus being useless) and saying “fuck it” and using my GCD (and dying, thus being useless).

Also, gear doesn’t feel impactful at all. Objectively, gear matters a lot because you get a massive penalty to all stats if your gear level is under the boss’s level. However, in practice, you get a sword that’s +2 gear levels and then go fight the next boss that’s +2 levels and it feels exactly the same. It’s not like Terraria when you get a sick new weapon and are excited to try it out. In this game, all swords are pretty much identical. They don’t even really have stats aside from the all-important gear level.

So yeah, I like the base building, I like the vibe, but I’m not having fun with the actual game. But it is a group activity so I’m gonna stick with it as long as team is still in. HGR is already planning a solo game on max difficulty level. He gets really into this kind of stuff. Maybe I can build his base for him.