A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order

With a disappointing lack of imagination it turns out 2016 is followed by 2017, increasingly looking like a prescient choice for the setting of The Running Man, and with a similarly disappointing lack of imagination my New Year gaming has been much the same since first picking up War Thunder at the start of 2013. There’s been another series of tasks with shiny plane rewards up for grabs, based on the World War II Chronicles again, a series of daily scenarios chronologically progressing through the war that offer a nice opportunity to switch between countries and aircraft types. The tasks aren’t particularly onerous but do require a bit of grinding, so with the Me 262 secured I’m ready for a bit of a rest.

I’m winding down in Guild Wars 2 as well. It’s consumed good chunks of the past few months, but the rolling boil of new game excitement has given way to the gentle simmer of daily routine. I’ve finished off the various story elements (the original game, expansion, and the ongoing Living Story) and have to say I haven’t been terribly engrossed. It starts well enough, each race having several options during character creation that lead to different vignettes, but as the levels increase the various paths intertwine to put everybody on the same road to defeating the Big Evil Thing, and my sense of involvement steadily diminished to the point that I felt like I was watching a bunch of NPCs, one of whom happened to be dressed like my character. I took to alt-tabbing off to other applications if some Basil Exposition NPC was monologuing away, popping back now and again just to check if I was supposed to be killing anything; running a pet-heavy Necromancer build was useful for that as the minions made a pretty decent fist of things while I was AFK

I might have been a bit more swept up in things if I’d started at launch and played through sequentially, but coming in after four years everything is in a strange MMO-superposition; the world is (apparently) dealing with the aftermath of some major event that happened in the Living Story Season 1 (which you can’t play retrospectively), after the events of the original game but before the expansion, the expansion that I poked a nose into before finishing the original story, with chunks of narrative coming from dungeons that I was running out-of-order at random levels depending on who else was around and what they were doing. The most compelling story in the world would struggle when tackled with such non-linearity, the bickering dullards of Destiny’s Edge never stood a chance, the only thing sticking in the memory being the opportunity to confuse them with Destiny’s Child with Hilarious Consequences. Some people are fully engaged with the lore, I saw some extensive debates about the behaviour of a particular NPC when a new chapter of the Living Story arrived, but for me at least it was more proof, if needed, that Bioware were rather mistaken in putting story as the “fourth pillar” of an MMO alongside exploration, combat and progression, at least until technology allows player choices to have some sort of impact on the world. It’s been the exploration, combat and progression that have kept me hooked on GW2, zone events, PvP, dungeons, crafting, fractals, bell-ringing, snowball fights and such.

Speaking of Bioware, Mass Effect: Andromeda now has a release date of March and I’m rather in the mood for a chunky RPG so started to have a look at the options in case there’s some shiny trinkets on offer for pre-ordering (sure enough there’s a suit of armour, a vehicle skin and a multiplayer booster up for grabs). There’s a Deluxe edition, with more in-game tchotchkes, and even a Super Deluxe edition that adds an extra multiplayer booster pack every week for 20 weeks. That seems like quite a heavy push for the multiplayer side of things, or maybe it’s just an easy way of bulking up the Super Deluxe package so that the Deluxe option doesn’t seem such an extravagance (Goldilocks pricing, and all that). Either way I rather enjoyed the mutliplayer aspect of both ME3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition (though the latter didn’t seem to catch on quite as much), but I never spent cash on boosters so I don’t think I’ll be going Super Deluxe for Andromeda. In the meantime I’ll need to find something else to distract me for a couple of months; maybe I’ll finish off that Christmas jigsaw…