Hello again! I actually went upstairs and brushed my teeth and was all ready for bed when I recalled that it was Tuesday and I had a blog post to write. So here I am!
Obviously there won't be a lot tonight but I can natter for a bit. I got scene five over to Uzo, so CORE #12 is proceeding; scene five is pretty hot, too, I think. Scenes six and seven should be pretty quick. Right now it's fifteen scenes total, but some of those are just a couple of pages. Do not expect it for Halloween.
No progress on the 'Modding' front. I am trying to decide if my hand is too open in some of the scenes so far, where I am showing the brainwashing rather than simply proceeding with the story and implying the brainwashing. Undecided on that.
On the video game front, what I had suspected might happen, has actually happened. Sunday evening I sat down, ready to play some more Divinity 2, and I realized: I didn't want to. I looked at the icon on my desktop and thought "Shit, another long-ass fight that will only be won by abusing the mechanics after having to reload a dozen times... nah, fuck that."
I'm like two or three fights from the end of the game, the big reveals and all that story stuff. But... it's just... work. It's not fun.
This is what I was bitching about from the start. The fight mechanics are so unforgiving that every fight is a chore. And instead of finding cool new gear and learning new skills which make the next few fights easier because I'm more of a badass, the next fight is totally impossible unless you have leveled up as much as possible and found all the higher level gear you can and min-maxed everything. At no point in the game are you ever a badass. The bad guys are always more powerful than you, and you can only ever win by the skin of your teeth.
It's not fun.
So it looks like Divinity 2 will now go to that grey Hades where games that were kind of cool but ultimately not something that was worth playing go, at least as far as I am concerned. I switched back over to my Europa Universalis IV campaign, and diplo-annexed Savoy which finally gave me that land bridge between my Austrian heartland and all of my low country possessions. After several vicious, close-run wars, I managed to break France, and it was nice to spend an evening tinkering with my government and occasionally helping Poland to remove kebab without stressing about one mis-click sending my rogue out of backstab range in the second round and having to re fucking load yet again.
Yes, yes, I really should have been working on 'Modding'. Thursday. Definitely Thursday.
I just started a Japan campaign! It's a fucking cockpit. But after the first thirty years or so you can unify the place and start looking out, plus you'll have like 87 Army tradition to help crush Korea with. ;)
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm unofficially past 50,000 words on my new Hive story, 'Robotic Restitution,' and there's probably at least another 500 words to go before chapter five is completed. I've already worked on it for at least 6 hours this week, and I'm not sure I'll get more time to tinker with it before the week is done.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I'm still not finished with act 2, I think that may take at least another chapter to finish. I'm toying with the idea of starting to release chapters, but I can't quite do that until I'm certain that I don't need to retroactively add plot points.
I'm not planning on subjecting this story to an outside editor as I don't feel it would be right to force anyone to edit a novel length story for free, so all that's keeping me from starting to deploy this bad boy is an awful lot of editing beyond the regular amount of story writing.
In other news, I've spent an inordinate amount of time playing 'Shadow of War,' the sequel to 'Shadow of Mordor.' There's something rather amusing to mind controlling orcs and forcing them to fight each other to level up to become your best captain, then deploying them to take other fortresses.
I am hoping for more mind control action later, but in the meantime it's a lot of fun mind controlling random orcs to fight for you.