Last November, you may recall, I got really, really drunk one night and bought myself a PlayStation 4. I played varying degrees of of Resogun and Warframe for a month or two, and then kind of said, alright. Good stuff should be rolling along soon enough. No sense in spending virtual money on free-to-play nonsense and the occasional DLC update. And then a year went by. Still no games bought for my snazzy PS4.
Sure, being a PS+ subscriber has afforded me a steady drip of indie content provided to me every month by Sony, so I guess you could say that the $50 I spend every year to keep the service means that I dropped at least some coin into this thing (if we're being semantic jerks about it), but I passed on InFamous: Second Son (which is still a stupid name to type), the Metal Gear demo, and a few other things. Then, and for some reason I was even surprised by some of this, games were getting delayed left, right, and center. Where's The Witcher 3 (and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember off the top of my head), I would say. Yes, the network capabilities of the PS4 is monumentally better than the PS3, so firing it up and streaming Netflix is a lot easier, but that's not why I bought this thing; I wanted cut up bad guys, shoot monsters, and agonize over stats in new and interesting ways. Where was the cutting and the shooting and the math-ing? My god, WHERE'S THE MATH-ING?
And so, with summer and the fall release calendar looming, I finally decided that enough's enough, and I need to get some return on this investment that's more than a sort-of-free PS+ copy of Don't Starve and a re-release of Pixel Junk: Shooter (though they're both really good). There is one game that I'm legitimately looking forward to in Dragon Age: Inquisition (I'm starting to hate colons, by the way), but that's not going to be here until November. What to do, then? Impulse buy Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, that's what.
I had never played a Diablo game before this, but I've played plenty of its progeny. The two Torchlight games are crazy good, and I spent enough hours with them then this should be a slam dunk, right? Well, yes, right, D3 is really good. But for some reason, I never want to play it. I come home, hang with the wife, fire it up out of duty because I spent $60 on it, and work my way into enjoyment like Cagney forced himself into a rage for White Heat. I knew that I would have a good time with the game, but I needed to push myself into it. After a little bit of thought, I think I've figured out why.
First, I love RPGs. I love getting new equipment and screwing with the stats. Note that I never said that I'm good at them; I'll never get involved in MOBA competitions, loose connection that they have, or play PvP Dark Souls just for the sake of it. But, as a personality quirk, I love killing things efficiently. Higher level weapons and grinding for the experience points to use them means I can stomp on things faster and, by my reckoning, better. If I have to learn some sort of arcane JRPG system with a silly name to do so, fine. Just let me get beefier, and let me make much shorter work of that dragon over there. Yes, that one, with the curry stain on its chest. Diablo lets you do this from jump street. Yes, the first few missions of the game leave you a little weak as far as equipment goes, but you gain levels with such reckless speed that this doesn't seem to be a problem since you're pretty much constantly gaining new special abilities for better enemy swatting.
But it was all a joke. After ignoring the advice of the internet at large, I played through it the first time with the Demon Hunter class on normal difficulty and --literally-- blasted my way through the game. The endgame bosses were bullet sponges, sure, but posed about as much of a threat as the pad of sticky notes right underneath my monitor. Yes, I've been slowly picking at it since on the various Adventure modes with different character builds since then, but have only in the last few days have I found a renewed interest in Diablo III, but I'm leaving it alone for now. That's because I'm a weak-willed idiot.
Destiny is an RPG about shooting things. It's unquestionably the biggest release of the year, and it's a game that I already had buyer's remorse for the second I agreed to pre-load it from the PlayStation Network on Monday night. Why did I do this? Again, I'm kind of an idiot. I played the beta build of the game earlier in the Summer and thought, yeah, this is good; the shooting feels smooth and the production value is through the roof, so at least it will run well. But it was joyless. The Borderlands games have taken the concept of the RPG/shooter and placed in its own very distinct wackiness. Bungie, talented and well-funded production studio that it is, has ostensibly remade Halo for a wider audience and with a wider expanse. It's all very self-serious and dramatic. Do all games need to have a sense of humor like Borderlands? No, but the concepts aren't very far off, and you don't need to take too many steps back to see it. Destiny is a beautiful shooting game, but it's a game with guns and enemies and jumping and the occasional grenade when you're not feeling too conservative with your armaments. That shit is everywhere. Full disclosure, then: I didn't plan on buying this, even though I thought it was pretty good from the beta. A friend of mine that lives kind of far away suggested that we get it and play it together. So maybe I have erratic purchasing habits, but at least I'm a good friend.
Let's go back to Diablo for a second. I mentioned a second ago that I had just found the carrot dangling in front of me to keep playing it. Ok, I say "found" when I really mean "started doing." In the Torchlight games, my favorite activity would be to find amazing, low-level equipment, dump it in my shared stash box, and superpower brand new characters. I get sick of it sooner or later, and just move on to another class. That's how this genre of game tends to work: make a character and battle through it the first time, but having something tangible to show for it when you want to try things a different way with a new character. In Diablo, this means forging crazy armor sets and scoring super rare loot. I can't say enough how much I love overpowering characters and steamrolling the idiot monster mooks that get in my way. I'm finally at the point in the game where this is a viable concern now that I've got one maxed out character and another pretty close. Rare loot is coming fast and loose these days, which means that monk I want to roll up later tonight will be a lesser god before it hits level 10.
Destiny doles out the new gear with much less frequency. So far, it's only been an hour here and there over the last few days, so I don't even know for sure if there's crafting yet, but I can't wait until I hit that same threshold. This morning, I scored a sniper rifle that, for whatever reason, has a minimum level requirement much below where I'm currently at. That will be for you, future second character. Maybe the buyer's remorse is starting to fade away.
But that's what it took, I guess: two games that I talked myself into buying to make this nearly year-old gaming console a going concern in my home. Even though it's a little early to tell with Destiny, it looks like got lucky with them. But, man, so I still want some new, brain melting stuff.
