May May Be Over

It’s Elise again. This month, I released:

• A piece about why I think Looter Shooters shouldn’t be made anymore. Mostly, I think the market is oversatured, the design is stale and not being expanded upon, and attempts by single player focused developers have failed. I didn’t actually play Redfall, but just reading about it made me feel exhausted. Interesting extra reading is this Jason Schreier article about the game’s troubled development. Apparently few people were excited to work on the game, and by the end of development 70% of the game’s staff had left.

• An article about my disappointment with Honkai: Star Rail’s free to play grinding. I am still playing the game but instead of being a truly great RPG, it’s a mediocre grind with some good elements.

• I wrote a few SEO pieces about Tears of the Kingdom, including this one where I described my experience of boarding a hot air balloon without a glider and having no way to get down. Great game, but I didn’t write anything substantial on it this month. Maybe next month?

• I reviewed Darkest Dungeon II, which I just didn’t connect with. I thought it was boring and frustrating, but it seems to have worked for a lot of other people.

• I also reviewed Planet of Lana, which was pretty good? It wasn’t outstanding but I enjoyed it, and it had a cute cat-thing. Look at him!

Game news has been interesting this month. Tears of the Kingdom is great! Redfall and Gollum are some of the worst games of the year! Overwatch 2’s PVE is greatly scaled back! Pharah is a lesbian!

Redfall being bad was a bummer. I was looking forward to another Arkane game. The biggest bummer though was Overwatch 2’s talent trees going kaput. I really believed we’d be getting a cool update to Overwatch 2 and I’m much less optimistic about the game’s future.

Outside of that, I’m still having health problems! I’ll be heading back to the doctor this month, but there’s no immediate end in sight. On the positive side, I do feel a bit less bad and might be able to do more next month. Maybe?

One of my hard drives broke, and while I had good backups of almost everything, I did lose a bunch of bulk data like installed games and such. I was slowly adding things back when the internet broke at my house! After investigating, we thought we’d fixed it, but it broke again yesterday. It’s temporarily working, but only when we disconnect half the house from the internet. Lots of technical issues this month, and I hope next month has less!

If I have my way, I’ll release something on Youtube next month. I actually have some better lighting coming for my filming setup, and hopefully that’ll make my the next video I film look a lot better.

Keep being creative, and happy Pride month.