There was a time I eschewed the romance options in Bioware games because I found the concept of in-game romance a little strange. I still do to some extent, but ultimately these games are story-telling simulators, and it’s just another kind of story. I’ve done enough of them now that I thought it might be interesting to rank them against each other, from worst to best.

Some notes on the scoring: I have tried as much as possible to be objective and to separate how much I like each character from how good their romance arc is. This isn’t a ranking of my favourite romanceable characters; it’s a ranking of how well-executed I found their romance stories to be.

I’m sure my preferences still influence the ranking, but I’ve tried to minimize it.

Leliana (Dragon Age: Origins):

Leliana is the one romance I genuinely regret pursuing. I picked her because I loved the stories she tells (and because of the sexy accent), but she’s too churchy, and when you romance her she gets so smarmy it’s just intolerable after a while.

Plus, I wound up having a kid with Morrigan anyway, so in retrospect I really should have just romanced her.

Samantha Traynor (Mass Effect III):

I don’t like giving a poor rating to Traynor’s romance. Traynor herself is awesome, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. If Bioware had designed a character to appeal specifically to me, I doubt they could have done a better job.

But if I’m being honest, the writing for her romance is terrible. There’s not much too it; mostly just minor tweaks to existing conversations, often involving awkwardly shoe-horned innuendo. The scene where you initiate the romance is so ridiculous I actually missed out on romancing her the first time through because I couldn’t believe the game actually wanted me to do that.

I still romance her on every playthrough, and to be fair, some of the scenes near the end are pretty good. But most of the time it plays out more like a cheesy porn parody of Mass Effect than anything, and turning Mass Effect into porn is supposed to be the Internet’s job.

Vector Hyllus (Star Wars: The Old Republic):

I’m not sure why Vector’s romance leaves me cold. He’s a very unique character — a human incorporated into an alien hive mind — and a very nice guy despite all his oddness. I can’t say anything bad about him, and his romance is written well enough, even if it’s a bit by the numbers (rather surprising given his alien nature).

But for whatever reason I’ve already forgotten most of it, and it hasn’t even been that long since I did it. Maybe I just have trouble imagining Vector the soulful (if strange) romantic with my cavalier agent.

Kaidan Alenko (Mass Effect trilogy):

The problem with Kaidan is that he’s one of those characters who feels like he was written as a romance choice first and a person second. He’s very likable… maybe a little too likable. He feels like an archetype of romantic perfection, not a real person.

It is interesting to be able to continue the relationship with him over three games, and on the whole it’s a pretty well-written romance, but I can’t quite get over how unreal a character he seems.

Dorian (Dragon Age: Inquisition):

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Dorian’s romance, but not a lot about it stands out, either. It’s easy, and it’s sweet, and that’s about it. You learn a little more about what makes Dorian tick, but not much.

Dorian remains one of my favourite Inquisition characters, but romancing him isn’t really necessary. He’s just as awesome as a friend.

Vette (Star Wars: The Old Republic):

My adoration of Vette is by now well-documented. She’s just an awesome, delightful character in every way. She’s a bit like Dorian in that her romance doesn’t seem to add a whole lot to her story, but given how incredibly sad and lonely her life has been, I do like the idea of being able to bring her some happiness.

I suppose on some level I like the idea of playing the white knight.

Lana Beniko (Star Wars: The Old Republic):

Lana’s romance is a hard one to rate. It spans several games, and due to the nature of MMOs, it isn’t over yet. Arguably this is true of the other SW:TOR romances as well, but companions from the base game still seem largely abandoned, and those romances tended to have a clear conclusion — usually marriage.

It’s also hard to rate because Lana is such an unusual character. She’s unusual in the context of Star Wars lore — a calm and selfless Sith, practically an oxymoron — but also just an unusual character in general. She’s so enigmatic, outwardly dispassionate with only tantalizing glimpses of the fierce emotion within.

But her oddness is what makes her compelling. I keep saying I want more variety in romantic fiction; here it is. Romancing Lana is far from the fairytale type of story we’re used to — it’s more sedate, more mature. Lana has other priorities beyond being arm candy for the player character, which helps her feel more real, and the story so far has hit a great balance between illustrating her feelings toward the PC without making them the sole focus of her character.

Lana is very three-dimensional, and by extension so is her romance.

Her occasional social awkwardness can be oddly endearing, too. You can ask her to fight a hundred Knights of Zakuul single-handedly and she won’t even blink, but try to compliment her or kiss her and she’ll get so adorably flustered.

My one complaint about her romance is can feel a bit rushed, a bit forced, at first — a common sin of these things. You’ll have known her for all of about fifteen minutes before she starts going on about your special connection.

Sera (Dragon Age: Inquisition):

Sera’s romance is many things: turbulent, challenging, frustrating, inconsistent. But it’s not boring.

Just initiating the romance with Sera was an uphill battle — though to be fair I made it harder on myself by being a Dalish mage — and even once I did lock in her romance there was still plenty of challenge. Sera is a strange, volatile person. She’s not easy to get along with, or even understand. Between her rambling speech pattern and thick accent, you practically need a translator sometimes.

There’s also one particular scene in her romance that really pissed me off, just for its poor design. I had to basically pretend that scene never happened for the sake of my sanity. I think the developers realize they screwed up there, though — Trespasser also seems to pretend it never happened.

However, there’s still something immensely gratifying about Sera’s romance if you can dodge all the landmines and make it through. Sera seems a simple character at first, but in actuality she’s spectacularly complex. Once you finally understand her, all her seemingly crazy behaviour starts to make sense.

She’s also an incredibly sweet and loving character (even if she can have odd ways of showing it). For all its frustrations, Sera’s romance probably has more “d’aww” moments than any other I’ve done.

Nadia Grell (Star Wars: The Old Republic):

Nadia is a character I really enjoy. I know she can rub some people the wrong way, and I understand why — she’s very over-eager, and she does have a certain air of “Senpai noticed me!” that can be a bit much at times — but I can’t help but find her enthusiasm infectious.

I also appreciate that she’s an idealist, but with a hard edge when the situation calls for it. She’s got a gentle heart, but she’s no push-over.

Yet that’s not why I’m giving her romance such high marks. The thing I find interesting about Nadia’s romance is that it seems more like she’s pursuing the player than the other way around. Normally in these games NPCs don’t display any interest at all until you’ve made a concerted effort to win them over. It made Nadia feel much more like a real person with agency all her own.

Plus it’s a pretty well-written romance all around. It’s got ups and downs and interesting choices to make, and you meet her pretty early in the game, so it feels natural to see the bond slowly grow between her and the player’s Jedi.

Merrill (Dragon Age II):

Merrill is a bit like Traynor in that she’s a character who could easily have been designed to appeal specifically to my tastes. A selfless, adorkable Elven blood mage with awesome tattoos and a charming accent? Sign me up.

Unlike Traynor, though, her romance arc is very well-executed.

There’s a lot to like about Merrill’s romance. I appreciate that it’s a slow burn. You can start flirting with her almost immediately, but it takes a while for an actual relationship to form. That makes it feel a bit more natural than these things tend to.

I haven’t played DA2 without romancing Merrill, so I’m not sure how much a difference it makes, but certainly it seemed to have a significant impact on conversations with her. Even her party banter with other characters changed. Also, her moving into Hawke’s house was a nice touch.

As with Vette, Merrill’s life is so sad that it feels good to bring her some happiness. She’s such a nice person, and yet she ends up hated and distrusted by almost everyone. At least if you romance her, she has someone who stands by her. In fact I seem to recall some party banter where she says her relationship with Hawke is just about the only thing keeping her together.

And there’s just nothing to complain about in Merrill’s romance. There’s no blatant poor writing or obnoxious game design. It just works.

I’ve long been tempted to do a post about my all-time favourite video games on this blog. Given how much I talk about gaming, it seems strange I haven’t.

One of the main stumbling blocks has been decided how to rate older games against newer ones. Many recent games are objectively better than their older equivalents in many key ways, but a lot of that is due to the march of technology. Is it right to hold that against older games?

I’ve decided to side-step the issue by simply not comparing apples to oranges. I’m going to do two separate lists ranking my favourite older and new games, with the period in my teens where I temporarily quit gaming serving as the divider between the two eras.

We start at the beginning, with the old school greats.

5: Dungeon Siege

There are a couple games I could mention here — Age of Kings is also a strong contender — but I chose Dungeon Siege because it marks an important turning point where my view of the RPG genre began to change.

By modern standards — and to some extent even by the standards of the time — Dungeon Siege was an excessively simplistic game, but I was just so refreshed by the idea of an RPG that got out of its own way and tried to simply be a fun adventure, rather than the clunky grindfests most of its competitors were at the time.

Its focus was on the action, not the character sheet, and the developers worked hard to make the gameplay as smooth and free of annoyances as possible. Auto-loot alone felt like a revolution at the time.

It also offered gorgeous graphics (for the time, and even today the environments hold up well), an excellent soundtrack, and some very interesting backstory and world-building.

Also, pack mules.

4: Myth II: Soulblighter

There are people out there who are very cynical about the current state of the gaming industry. They’ll swear up and down that today’s games can’t hold a candle to those of yesteryear.

I vehemently disagree with this perspective, but there are still a handful of older games that haven’t been equaled, even today. The Myth franchise is one example of this.

Myth was something very unique. It was an RTS, but there was no economic management. You were given a set number of units and an objective and simply set loose in the wilderness to survive as best you could — usually against almost impossible odds.

It also featured a hyper-realistic combat engine unlike anything I’ve ever seen in gaming. The wind blew arrows off course, rain caused grenade fuses to fizzle, body parts rolled downhill. This ruthless commitment to realism was one of the main contributors to Myth’s intense, frankly excessive difficulty, but often failure was so spectacular it became part of the games’ charm.

The story and lore were also wildly unique, with an incredibly inventive take on high fantasy. Traditional elements like Dwarves and sorcerers co-existed with entirely new creations like the horrific Myrkridia, the immortal Trow, and the alien Fetch. Inspiration was drawn from unusual sources, like Gaelic and Mesoamerican cultures. The Mayan-samurai Heron Guard remain my all-time favourite interpretation of the paladin archetype.

And there was such depth. One common sin of video game story-telling is that developers only create enough lore for whatever story they want to tell, but Myth created a vast and detailed world whose history and geography we saw only a fraction of during the games.

The Fallen Lords was excellent, but its sequel, Soulblighter, was even better. Deeper gameplay, an even more intense story, and a grander adventure all around.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: You just have to respect a man who ripped out his own heart and cut off his own face “in a ritual too dark to name.”

3: StarCraft

The 90s and early 2000s were the golden age of the RTS genre, and Blizzard was its master. StarCraft, in particular, was a revolution in strategy gaming.

There had been RTS games with differing factions before, of course. Dune II beat StarCraft to the punch on the idea of three playable factions. But its factions were nearly identical, with only a handful of unique units.

In StarCraft, each race is entirely unique from the ground up. Different units, mechanics, and strategies, and yet Blizzard was able to deliver a balanced game where each race could compete despite their wild differences.

StarCraft’s influence on gaming is undeniable. It was a major force in the rise of eSports, and it has forever changed the gaming lexicon. Even outside of Blizzard games, everyone understands the concept of a Zerg rush (kekeke).

But for me my memories are still of rushing home from school to play the campaign, giggling with my friends over the dragoon’s spam click quotes. It was a pillar of my childhood.

I don’t hold up the original StarCraft’s campaign as the masterpiece of sci-fi intrigue some like to paint it as, but it was on the whole a good story, and StarCraft has cemented itself as one of my all time favourite sci-fi franchises.

StarCraft is also notable for being the first game where I can remember really enjoying the soundtrack. The music may have been a little cheesy, but that didn’t make it any less fun.

Duh-na-na-na, duh-da-da-na, duh-na-na-na na-na-na…

2: No One Lives Forever: The Operative

Like the Myth games, No One Lives Forever was one of those rare games that even today hasn’t quite been surpassed. I’ve heard it said that NOLF was so ambitious and creative it simply never would have been made today, and I think there might be some truth to that. That or it would be some sprawling open world grindfest, a mile wide and an inch deep, rather than the vast but lovingly intricate game it was.

A delightfully campy homage to the spy craze of the 1960s, NOLF put players in the role of feminist super spy Cate Archer as she battled the twin threats of gender inequality and the terrorists of H.A.R.M. with a wide arsenal of guns, gadgets, and acerbic wit.

It featured some of the most wildly creative level design in gaming history. The most oft-cited example is the mission where you fall out of an exploding plane without a parachute, engage in a mid-air gun fight with H.A.R.M. paratroopers, and have to wrestle a parachute off one of the enemy goons before you leave a small crater.

But NOLF’s massive campaign also took players to Switzerland, Morocco, east Berlin, the bottom of the North Sea, and outer space, among others.

NOLF was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. It was the first game I played with dialogue choices, as well as the first I played with something resembling a new game plus mode, which gave it huge replay value.

The stealth missions were irritating, but even so it stands as one of the finest games ever made.

1: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos

The word “epic” has been abused a fair bit by the gaming community, but if you want a game that truly personifies what “epic” truly means, Warcraft III is that game.

How good was the story in Reign of Chaos? Well, let’s put it this way. After seeing one cinematic, my mother — who has no interest in gaming or much of anything outside her own narrow field — insisted that I keep her posted on further developments, to the point of calling her down to watch the cinematics if she wasn’t busy.

Prior to Warcraft III, the Warcraft universe had been tremendously simple. Fun, but simple. Reign of Chaos blew up everything we thought we’d known about Warcraft and created a vastly deeper, more complex world. It turned the Orcs into real people with a rich culture and intense inner conflict. It showed the once perfect Alliance crumbling from the rot within. It defied our expectations, it shocked, it inspired, and it ended with a powerful message of hope that would have been at home in the finest Star Trek episode.

And it was so damn epic. It truly felt like the war to end all wars, with the fate of everything on the line. The villains were terrifying. The heroes awe-inspiring.

Nor was the story its only virtue. As a video game, it also excelled. It all but created its own genre by hybridizing the very best aspects of both real time stategy and role-playing games. It was exciting, but not stressful. Challenging, but not unforgiving.

It took the focus away from tedious economic management and put it squarely on the action. Nothing in gaming can beat the satisfaction of casting exactly the right spell at exactly the right moment in Warcraft III.

It was about as close to perfect as any game will ever be.

Honourable mentions:

There weren’t as many excellent games back in the day as there are now, but there are still a few others worthy of recognition. As mentioned above, the Age of ___ games were fantastic, another pillar of the golden age of the RTS genre, and Age of Kings, in particular, stole a lot of my childhood.

Later Age of Mythology sparked a lifelong interest in ancient mythology so intense I now have idols of deities from three separate pantheons watching over me from my headboard as I sleep.

Also on the subject of old RTS greats, the first two Warcraft games were also quite strong, even if Reign of Chaos ultimately eclipsed them. In a roundabout way they’re responsible for my becoming a writer, actually. The Elven archers ignited my love of Elves, which led them to be the focus of the make believe games I played with my friends, which evolved into an entire universe and mythology of my own creation, which led me to learn how to write so I could share these stories.

Also, while I think the franchise has long since lost its way, I do think the original Call of Duty was something of a masterpiece. It certainly gave me a deeper appreciation for the sacrifices of veterans than I’d ever had before.

Halloween as an adult is always a little depressing, isn’t it? It used to be a day you spent all year looking forward to, and now… it’s Monday.

Halloween celebrations in online games can at least soften the blow a bit.

The Secret World’s Halloween celebrations are, of course, the stuff of legends, but I must admit I’m not quite feeling the usual joy this year.

The new event is… strange. There’s not much story. A lot of it boils down to new world boss fights, but there’s a sort of puzzle-like requirement to summon them. Mostly it involves a lot of people running around like headless chickens, desperately hoping to find their targets before the boss despawns. I can’t say I’m fond of the time limit.

Of course, the official forums are on fire. For my part, while I agree with most of the criticisms, I’m inclined to judge the event less harshly than some.

I at least give Funcom credit for trying something different. The elements of mystery and community cooperation that this event hinges on are cool in theory. In practice it hasn’t turned out well, but I don’t think we should penalize developers too harshly for trying new things. The industry is risk-adverse enough already.

Ultimately, you have to accept that not all experiments are going to work, so if you want games to try new things, you need to learn to live with the occasional hiccup.

It is worth noting that as of this writing we haven’t uncovered the entirety of the event yet. There’s quite a mystery over how to summon the empowered versions of the bosses. My opinion of the event may change, for better or for worse, once we’ve seen all of it.

All the previous events are back again, too, but those aren’t quite igniting my fancy this time, either. That’s just simple burnout, though. The Broadcast is still awesome, but I’ve done it a rough estimate of eleventy bajillion times now, so it doesn’t have quite the same lustre it used to.

One thing that has been interesting, though, is that I recently discovered an old friend from the TrekUnited days has gotten into TSW, and this is her first Halloween in the game. I’ve been helping her out here or there, which is gratifying. She even lucked into a couple of rare drops from my goody bags.

On that note, the new dance from this year’s party bag is awesome. I think it’s the most elaborate emote I’ve ever seen in an MMO.

Tip: For best results, equip Hell skin fist weapons before dancing.

Meanwhile, Landmark is also having a Halloween event. As one would expect from a game like Landmark, it’s mainly player driven. The developers just plunked down an island for seasonal builds and let people go nuts.

I haven’t had too much time to spend in Landmark lately, but from what I’ve seen the Halloween island is another testament to the talent of the Landmark community. It’s not particularly scary, but it’s fun in a cheesy haunted house kind of way.

The trouble with Landmark from a blogger’s perspective is that there’s never too much to say about it. Wandering around gawking at pretty sights is plenty enjoyable, but it doesn’t require in-depth analysis.

In other news…

Moving on from Halloween, I’ve got a few more articles published at MMO Bro I hope may be of interest.

Firstly, I take a look at the surprisingly swift release of Nova as a playable commander in StarCraft II’s co-op.

Nova is astonishingly fun, I have to say. She solves almost every complaint I’ve ever had about SC2’s game mechanics. As much as it feels like a betrayal of my Protoss brethren, she may well be my new favourite commander.

The fact she’s spectacularly overpowered doesn’t hurt, either. I’m trying to get plenty of games in with her now, because I’m convinced she’ll be nerfed soon. The reactions from some of the people I’ve been matched with have been hilarious, though a lot of them can’t be repeated in polite company.

Next, I also took a second look at Skyforge following its huge Ascension patch, only to discover it really isn’t that different.

Skyforge feels like a tragic waste of potential to me. It does some things very well, but when you get down to it, it’s still an incredibly shallow game.

Not for the first time, I wish it was possible to combine different aspects of various MMOs, Frankenstein-style. Imagine SW:TOR’s story with Skyforge’s combat and graphics. That would be a truly amazing game.

I remember hearing something about a new time travel-themed show called Travelers that sounded interesting. Unfortunately it slipped my mind to keep an eye out for the premiere, but then I got a message from one of my regular readers mentioning that they’d fallen in love with the show and recommending I try it. Showcase’s website had the first two episodes available to watch, so I gave it a go.

Pilot episode:

In the world of Travelers, some unnamed disaster in the far-flung future has wiped out most of humanity. In order to prevent this grisly fate, the technology has been developed to send people’s consciousnesses back in time, where they possess the body of someone moments before their death.

The first episode introduces us to one particular team of travelers (apparently there’s an entire army of them) as they enter their hosts and adjust to life in the twenty-first century.

It’s not a strong start.

Travelers’ pilot is very slow and tells us precious little about what is actually going on. I have a certain feeling of being strung along in the hopes of answers, which is something I truly hate in fiction.

It’s already clear that a lot of the series is going to be devoted to showing the travelers’ struggles to maintain their covers and cope with their new lives — the pilot is devoted almost entirely too this — but that’s not an angle that much appeals to me. I’d rather focus on the sci-fi.

I will grant that a few of the concepts are a bit interesting. One traveler, Philip, landed in the body of a heroine addict and is now struggling to cope with his withdrawals, and another, Marcy, wound up possessing a mentally challenged woman and now has to explain why she can suddenly read and use complete sentences.

The other characters are far less interesting, though.

There are other problems too, such as numerous plot holes. Supposedly most of their intelligence on the past comes from mining the Internet for data, yet apparently they don’t understand Internet slang?

There’s a lot of stuff like that. One moment, the travelers’ knowledge of the past is encyclopedic, the next they’re running into all kinds of problems due to their incomplete intelligence. Marcy being one of the more prominent examples.

Furthermore, it’s clearly established that their goal is to change the past, on a large scale, and yet sometimes they seem determined not to change history. At one point there’s a scene where one traveler has the chance to save someone from death, but he doesn’t because that death was “supposed” to happen according to history. It would be a powerful scene, but the whole point of the travelers’ mission is to change history and save lives, so it just doesn’t make any sense.

The one thing I can say in Travelers’ favour right now is the cast seems really strong. Every actor seems unusually comfortable in their roles for a pilot, and they’re all putting on strong performances.

Also, it is good to see yet more Canadian sci-fi. Already spotting some familiar faces, like Ian Tracey (Sanctuary’s Dr. Jekyll and Continuum’s Jason Sadler) and Leah Cairns (BSG’s Racetrack).

Overall rating: 5.9/10

“Protocol 6”:

Travelers’ second episode is a bit less uneventful, though still not terribly impressive.

With the team assembled, the travelers embark on their first mission: preventing a massive explosion that originally claimed thousands of lives. The sudden shift from fishes out of water to expert team saving the world is a bit jarring, but at least it’s a little more interesting.

There’s not quite as much time wasted on each character’s alter ego, and the pacing isn’t quite so slow, but there’s still a fair bit of problems. There’s still that inexplicable disconnect between their trying to alter the past while also trying not to alter the past. There’s still no clue what happened to make the future so bad, and no hint of any over-arching storyline. It will be a tremendous waste of potential if this turns out to be a “case of the week” show.

I don’t understand why the different traveler teams aren’t allowed to help each other, either, but add it to the list, I guess.

The only thing about this show I’m particularly enjoying so far is Marcy. The dynamic with her social worker is pretty interesting.

Overall rating: 6.1/10 I’m not sure if I’m going to keep watching this show right now. There’s some potential, but it certainly hasn’t impressed me so far.

All apologies to the fellow he recommended it to me. I’m sure this isn’t the glowing review you were hoping for.

I woke up today feeling like it was Christmas morning. BlizzCon is always exciting, and after some of the hints we’ve seen, I was expecting some really huge news.

Instead, it’s turned out to be perhaps the most disappointing BlizzCon to date. Certainly the most disappointing since I’ve started following it closely.

Overwatch: The worst kept secret in gaming

They began with the announcement we all knew was coming: The hacker Sombra will be the next playable character in Overwatch.

I’ll give them some credit for announcing her in a pretty dramatic way. They began with a retrospective video of Overwatch’s launch, only for Sombra to hack the feed — I genuinely thought the stream was crashing for a bit — and for that to dovetail into a new animated short introducing Sombra as she aids her Talon allies in attacking Volskaya Industries.

Sombra looks a lot more interesting than Overwatch’s other antagonists to date. She has an agenda of her own and seems to be playing both sides — her loyalty to Talon seems far from absolute.

That said, Blizzard’s continued reticence to do anything with the Overwatch IP is making it increasingly hard for me to get excited about anything to do with the game.

I do appreciate that they are maintaining their commitment to diversity in Overwatch, if nothing else. Both characters added post-launch have been women of colour, and the game’s cast is now close to perfect gender parity, as well. Now at ten females, twelve males, one non-gendered.

They also announced a new “arcade” mode that mostly seems to involve death match arenas, some new maps, and an ambitious new eSports league, but again, not really interesting me.

StarCraft: SkyNet, Nova, and Stukov

StarCraft II is the only game coming out of this BlizzCon’s opening ceremony to offer me anything approaching genuine excitement, which is a sad commentary on the whole convention.

Firstly, the final installment of the Nova DLC was confirmed to be launching on November 22 (appropriately enough), which is welcome news. More Nova is always good, and now that all three parts are out, I can finally play through it.

Second, fan favourite and eternal badass Alexei Stukov has been confirmed as the next playable commander in co-op. He would count as a Zerg commander, I suppose, but he seems to be very unique, based mainly on infested versions of Terran buildings and units.

We’re short on details on exactly how Stukov is going to play at the moment, but it’s good to see more ambitious updates to co-op regardless. And those infested battlecruisers look pretty sweet.

Also, walking bunkers.

Yes.

They’ve also mentioned new co-op maps coming soon. Details on this are only now coming in as I’m writing, but it looks like we’re finally getting that co-op version of Outbreak we’ve all been wanting forever. Awesome!

On the downside, I’m also hearing Blizzard is going to add leaderboards to co-op —  a competitive aspect that I don’t think anyone wanted, and which may lead to co-op ending up on the same endless nerf/buff rollercoaster as 1v1.

Finally, perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of BlizzCon so far is that Blizzard has partnered with the DeepMind team to use StarCraft II for advanced artificial intelligence research. It’s at best unclear what if any benefits this will ultimately have for us as players, but the very fact that the game we love is now going to be at the forefront of AI research is really exciting.

Heroes and Hearthstone: Steady as she goes

Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are pretty much just chugging along as you’d expect. Nothing to complain about, but nothing to get particularly excited for, either.

As many expected, Varian Wrynn will be joining Heroes as its next playable character. Although I was expecting a very standard warrior, he’s looking to be one of the most unique heroes to date. He’s actually a multi-role hero (I wonder how that will work with quests?) who can radically change his capabilities through several crucial talent choices.

The other new hero is Ragnaros the Firelord. I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about him at the moment.

They also spent a lot of time talking about next week’s brawl. I’m not sure why a weekly brawl is worth so much attention in the opening ceremonies. Were they just trying to fill time?

Meanwhile, Hearthstone is of course getting another expansion, Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. I don’t have a lot of interest in Hearthstone, and I don’t see this expansion changing that, but I will say they seem to have some neat ideas. Tri-class cards are pretty creative, and the Kabal and Jade Lotus factions seem genuinely interesting — would love to explore them in WoW.

Diablo: Remake, necromancer, and disappointment

But by far the biggest disappointment came when they finally got around to Diablo announcements. After the necromancer leak, I was sure we were finally getting another expansion to wrap up Reaper of Souls’ cliff-hanger ending.

Nope.

We are getting the necromancer as a paid DLC, but no new story content. They did mention two new zones (as free updates), but they’re going to be adventure-mode exclusives like Greyhollow Island. Something to poke your head into for an hour and then forget about.

The other big news is that the first Diablo game is being recreated within Diablo III. We’ll be able to use our existing characters, so I guess the original classes aren’t coming back, but they will be bringing back at least some of the original mechanics (including intentionally making the graphics look worse, because apparently common sense and the Diablo franchise have severed all ties).

This is a confusing decision, and I’m not sure who the target audience is. I can understand trying to capitalize on some nostalgia, and broadly I like the idea of resurrecting old games, but it’s going to be too different from the original to satisfy the purists, and I’m not sure how much modern gamers are going to enjoy something that has been deliberately designed to be more clunky and visually unappealing than current content.

Diablo III badly needed a new expansion. There are so many story threads left unfinished, so many lands left to explore. The game can’t survive on adventure mode and seasons forever. I want to play more, but there’s just nothing left in the game for me to do. The base game and its expansion were wildly successful, and there can be no doubt a new expansion would do well. I just don’t get it.

The necromancer does look cool — I love necromancers in general, and Diablo’s take on the archetype especially — but is it worth forking over cash just to play through exactly the same content as a new character?

I hate how gamers are always pronouncing premature death on games, but at the risk of hypocrisy, I think we may now declare Diablo III dead in the water. Yes, it’s getting some more updates, but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of true forward momentum here. The story has been abandoned unfinished, and the game is just chasing its tail.

Between this, StarCraft’s apparent abandonment of mission packs, and Overwatch’s inexplicable aversion to exploring its own lore, I’m beginning to wonder if Blizzard is simply moving away from narrative in its games altogether.

That’s pretty much the only thing that could finally break my lifelong Blizzard fandom.

* * *

And that’s it. Nothing at all announced for World of Warcraft. No mention of a Warcraft movie sequel. Undoubtedly more news is to come as the convention unfolds, but it’s not likely to be anything huge.

What a massive disappointment.

This year’s BlizzCon didn’t exactly get off to a strong start. It’s worth noting I’ve experienced a significant traffic spike over the past two days, and from what I can tell it’s mostly from people Googling “BlizzCon disappointment” and similar phrases.

That said, for all the disappointment of the opening ceremony and the way Diablo is falling apart, there has been some good news in the subsequent talks and panels. World of Warcraft, especially, is coming out of the convention looking very good, despite being all but ignored by the opening ceremony.

The road ahead:

Blizzard amazed all and sundry by discussing not one, not two, but three upcoming content patches for WoW.

First up is patch 7.1.5, a minor patch adding a few tweaks and new systems. Brawler’s Guild will be returning with new content, which should excite both of the people who play it.

They’re also adding a new series of micro holidays that will only last for a day or two. They’re going out of their way to make these not particularly rewarding, even in regards to cosmetics. That’s nice in that it’s no big deal if you miss logging in for such brief events, but it makes me wonder what the point of these things even is.

Finally, the one thing in 7.1.5 that interests me is that Mists of Pandaria dungeons will now be included in Timewalking. Mists was probably the best dungeons have ever been, so that’s welcome.

Most of the big news, though, focuses on the next major patch: 7.2, Tomb of Sargeras. As the name would imply, we’ll return to the Broken Shore to confront the Legion at their beachhead. Obviously the Tomb will be a raid, with figures like Kil’jaeden and the Avatar of Sargeras as bosses.

I’m kind of not sure how to feel about this. Where do they even go from here? Like, how do you escalate from fighting basically the entire Legion command structure? This is only the second patch…

There will also be a new faction to grind reputation with, Legionfall. I’m already having flashbacks to the ungodly Suramar grind, but rep grinding seems to be par for the course this expansion, so I guess we’ll have to roll with it.

Otherwise, though, it’s looking like a really promising patch.

The best news is probably on the dungeon front. Not only is the Tomb of Sargeras going to have a five-man wing, the Cathedral of Eternal Night, which will not be mythic-only, but all current mythic-only dungeons will gain queueable heroic modes (Karazhan will be divided into two wings to make it more manageable).

This is simply fantastic news. The WoW developers learning from their mistakes is shocking enough, but the fact they’re doing so relatively quickly is all but unheard of. It’s almost like they have some humility, or they value all their players equally or something.

Furthering the impression that Blizzard may actually value multiple playstyles, the class storylines will continue in patch 7.2, and there will be a new artifact appearance earned through a difficult solo challenge. More emphasis on skill rather than grind is always a good thing.

Next, flying will return in 7.2. We don’t have a lot of details on what the second half of Pathfinder will entail, but I’m expecting a lot of rep grinding. Not looking forward to that, but I am glad that we now have a clear answer on flight’s fate, and that it isn’t something we’ll have to wait until the very end of the expansion for.

On top of that, we’ll also be getting unique class-specific flying mounts. Some will even have multiple variations for different specs.

Rogues will get a crow.

A crow.

I’m not normally the sort of person who gets particularly excited about mounts, but crows are awesome, and a nice, unpretentious crow or raven mount has been my most-wanted mount for years now. The class mounts require exalted with Legionfall and completion of the new class story, so I doubt I’ll bother for most characters, but I need that crow in my life.

Another cool-sounding feature in 7.2 is the addition of Legion invasions. These will be similar to the pre-expansion event, but tied into the world quest system. They’ll only be in the Broken Isles, which is a bit of a shame, but the pre-expansion invasions were a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to these.

The final major addition currently announced for 7.2 is the addition of a PvP brawl mode, similar to the brawl modes that have proliferated to virtually every Blizzard game seemingly overnight.

I don’t PvP much, so I personally have no particular opinion on the matter, but I do not think this will go over well. WoW players are not the sort of people who like surprises or adapting to unusual mechanics. They like things safe, predictable, and rigidly balanced.

Overall, 7.2 is not without its worrying aspects, but overall it’s shaping up to be a very promising patch.

Lastly, they provided a brief teaser for the next major patch after 7.2: We’re going to Argus.

Not sure how to feel about this. Thanks to my enmity for the Draenei, I’ve long-dreaded the seemingly inevitable foray to their sparkly, lore-breaking homeworld. But I guess the silver lining is that it will just be a patch, not a whole expansion.

It’s another thing that makes me wonder where we go from here, though. How do you follow up “invade the Legion’s homeworld and kick the asses of all their leaders”?

The rest:

There’s been a bit more non-WoW news, as well.

Haunted Mines will at last be returning to Heroes of the Storm, with some tweaks to its design. I don’t play Heroes much anymore, but I always liked Haunted Mines, so it’s heartening on some level to see it returning.

Heroes is also getting some tweaks to its leveling mechanics. Hero levels will now be (nearly) infinite, levels past ten will be quicker to acquire, and every level will now have some form of reward. Seems pretty similar to Overwatch, but with less RNG. Sounds good.

Diablo is getting an absolutely bizarre new mode called challenge rifts. As I understand it, they’ll randomly select a player out of the entire game’s community, and then for the rest of the week everyone in the game will be able to play a clone of their character — same skills, same gear — to compete on leaderboards.

Oookaay…?

Otherwise, the Diablo fanbase is pretty much rioting and setting fire to cars right now. I’m still feeling pretty bitter myself. Reaper of Souls was so good, and I was so excited for what was to come. Now it looks Diablo III is simply being abandoned, at least as an actual RPG with a narrative.

I just don’t understand what’s going through the minds of the people at Blizzard. RoS was a big success by pretty much every conceivable metric. Why not keep the momentum up? Why are they just throwing in the towel?

I’ve actually been giving serious thought to writing my own fan fic “expansion”* just to satisfy my own sanity. Wouldn’t exactly be the first time I’ve done something like that.

*(With black! And hookers!)

Instead of doing a top ten list of all my favourite video games, I’ve decided it’s more fair to rank my favourite older and newer games separately, five each. I’ve already covered the old school greats, so now it’s time to run down my top five games from the modern era.

5: Dungeon Siege III

Entry #24601 in the “things Tyler loves that everyone else hates” category is Dungeon Siege III.

It is a very big departure from the previous games in terms of game mechanics. Part of me misses the old model. But looked at on its own merits, it’s still quite a strong RPG.

Choosing a class (or character in this case) is more generic than just playing and evolving naturally, but the “class” designs are among the best I’ve seen. Lucas is just your standard warrior dude, but the others are more unique:  Reinhardt is a steampunk techno mage; Katarina is a gun-toting, curse-flinging gypsy witch; and Anjali is a divine warrior-priestess who can shapeshift into a fire elemental.

Anjali in particular is one of my all-time favourite characters/classes in any RPG. Just so much fun.

And while it was a departure in terms of gameplay, it’s a true sequel to the original Dungeon Siege in terms of story, something DS2 definitely wasn’t. In fact it improves upon the already strong lore of the original, deepening and expanding it, and it evolves into a complex, powerful story with an incredible ending.

Add some gorgeous graphics and a lovely soundtrack and you have one of the most underrated games ever.

4: Portal 2

Much has already been said about the Portal games by myself and others, so I don’t see a lot of need to repeat it. If you’ve played them, you know how special they are. If you haven’t, go do that right now. I’ll wait.

Both games were good, but I think Portal 2 is the more memorable one. The first Portal was entirely too short. Portal 2 had all the same wit and creativity, and while it’s still a relatively short game, it’s not quite the “blink and you’ll miss it” affair the first was.

3: Mass Effect 3

And again another of my unpopular opinions.

While I seem to be the only one that feels this way, I found Mass Effect 3 to be the strongest entry in the trilogy by a significant margin. I’ve always been a fan of epic, apocalyptic stories, and ME3 certainly delivers on that front. In the previous games, the Reapers were a distant threat, but in ME3 their full fury is unleashed, and as the game unfolds, you get to see them tear the galaxy apart in excruciating detail.

It’s a dark, intense story, and I admire that it pulls no punches. The heroes fail many times throughout the story, and the losses are deeply felt. Not many games have the guts for that.

Like ME2, it’s also a very big game with lots of side missions and secondary content, but unlike ME2, none of it feels irrelevant or chore-like. Everything connects to the main story. Everything feels important, and exciting.

Even the most minor side-quests can be memorable. For me one of the most gut-wrenching moments of the game is a brief side mission where you assist in the evacuation of the Elcor homeworld. It’s just the most basic kind of collection quest, but the ambassador’s reaction at the end is so powerful.

And then there’s the excellence that is the Rannoch arc, and the sheer joy of drunk Tali, and all the little conversations between the crew members between missions, and Traynor… It’s just an excellent experience all around.

2: StarCraft II

StarCraft II’s sheer scale can make it a difficult game to rate. It has had two expansions the size of standalone games plus a fair bit of DLC. Looked at as a total package, StarCraft II is now massive in scale.

And it has had its stumbles along the way. Wings of Liberty was mostly a good game but did suffer from Blizzard’s failed experiment with non-linear storytelling, and I think we can all agree Heart of the Swarm was something of a disappointment.

But when you look at the big picture, it’s clear StarCraft II’s successes easily outweigh its failures. Despite its hiccups, Wings of the Liberty still wound up being a pretty strong story, and Legacy of the Void was one of the greatest sci-fi epics I’ve seen in gaming. Hell, even Heart of the Swarm gave us Abathur and the Primal Zerg, so it was hardly a total loss.

Similarly, I’m not without complaints about its gameplay, but overall SC2 still deserves to go down as one of the great RTS games of all time. The campaigns have featured some of the most creative level design in gaming history, the co-op mode added in Legacy of the Void is infinitely replayable and incredibly fun, and its competitive play remains one of the greatest tests of skill in the gaming world.

1: The Secret World

I’ve already spent no shortage of time raving about how amazing TSW is, so I shouldn’t repeat myself too much.

A lot of my love for this game boils down to the fact that story will always be the most important part of gaming for me, and TSW has some of the best writing in video game history. Its dialogue is second to none, its characters are unforgettable, its world-building is spectacularly deep and incredibly original, and its ambiance is like nothing else.

But it’s no slouch in the gameplay department, either. I love how you can build your own “class.” I love that it’s challenging, but not cheap. I love how the enemies are powerful and intelligent rather than just HP sponges to be mowed down. I love that its progression is fair to all playstyles and offers incredible freedom to the player. I love how many awesome cosmetics there are to collect.

As with the first list’s winner, Warcraft III, The Secret World is probably as close to a perfect video game as we’re ever going to see.

Honourable mentions:

Despite some initial stumbles (and a few lingering problems), Diablo III has evolved into a really excellent game, as the hundreds of hours I’ve sunk into it can attest. It was sort of a dead heat between Diablo and Dungeon Siege for the fifth spot in this list.

Something that has been interesting about recent years in the gaming industry has been the growing push for video games as art, and it’s produced a number of titles that are truly amazing experiences despite being light on gameplay. The Park, Oxenfree, and Remember Me all come to mind as examples of this.

Obviously World of Warcraft is conspicuous in its absence from the list, but despite the countless hours I’ve spent with it, it has far too many flaws to be considered a truly great game. SW:TOR is another title that has given me some great times but has too much wrong with it to earn a spot among my all-time favourites.

It does seem a bit strange that I’ve spent the majority of my gaming time over the past ten years playing MMOs, and yet only one of them made my top five (albeit with top honours). I’m not sure what, if anything, should be read from that.

With my Star Trek rewatch wrapping up, I was looking for something new to watch on Netflix. Enter Glitch. I’d not heard of this show, but the premise seemed intriguing, so I decided to give it a shot. What I discovered was an intriguing, if flawed, series.

So far, only the first season is available, and it’s extremely short (only six episodes), so it seemed to make more sense to review the entire season instead of going episode by episode.

The other walking dead:

Glitch is a show with a simple yet unusual premise. One night, in a small town in rural Australia, a number of dead people claw their way out of their graves. Confused and frightened, they are found by a local police officer named James, and a doctor named Elishia.

They are not zombies. They’re not animate corpses. They appear to have been truly resurrected, restored to life in apparently perfect health.

This despite the fact that all of them have been dead and buried for years. The most newly deceased is Kate, James’ wife, who died of cancer two years previously. The eldest is Patrick Fitzgerald, the town’s founder, who has been dead since the nineteenth century.

In between those extremes are a diverse collection of deceased. The kind and gentlemanly Charlie was a soldier in the First World War. Carlo met his end in the 40s. Maria is a pious Italian housewife who fell in the 1960s. Kirstie was a wild child before her untimely death in the late 80s. One, found in an unmarked grave, has no memories at all and is simply labelled John Doe.

It falls to James and Elishia to hide the Risen (as they are called) as sinister forces begin to seek them out. As for the Risen themselves, they are left to struggle with life after death. Many of them are alone in the world, their friends and family having died long ago, yet for those who still have relations among the living, the path may be harder still.

It’s certainly an interesting premise. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. The mystery is intriguing, but there may be a little too much of it.

You would think that a show with such a short season would waste no time, but in fact Glitch is a very slow-paced show that is very stingy with its answers. Most of the questions you probably have right now if this is your first time hearing about the show are questions I still have, even after seeing every episode.

There is going to be a second season, so there’s still time to explain things, but I don’t like being strung along like this.

It also turn into a bit of a soap opera sometimes. Being who I am, I am of course most interested in the fantastical elements of the show, but Glitch spends more time on interpersonal relationships and who’s sleeping with who this week. It can get a bit tiresome.

Glitch also features my least favourite kind of story: the love triangle. And this is a really good example of why I hate love triangles so much. It takes up a lot of screentime while doing nothing whatsoever to advance the story. It accomplishes nothing but to make every character involved look like a total sleazebag.

On that note, another issue with Glitch is that most of the characters are pretty unlikable. It lessens the drama when you don’t care about half the cast.

The good news is that the characters that I do like, I really like.

By far the highlight of the show is Charlie. His earnest, good-hearted nature does wonders to make the otherwise grim tone of the series easier to bear.

I’m also rather fond of Kirstie. She’s not the most level-headed person, but her spunk can be endearing, and she has one of the better stories in the show. I won’t spoil too much, but the most powerful scene in the season comes from her exploring her tragic past. It’s very powerful.

Patrick grew on me after a while, too. He’s a bit of a lowlife in some ways, but he’s not without his own odd form of charm.

Those three are what carry the show. Even if I’m frustrated by the slow pace or sneering at the rest of the cast, I’m enjoying the stories of Charlie, Kirstie, and Patrick enough to make Glitch worthwhile.

Overall rating: 7.3/10 Probably not going to be your new favourite show, but it might be worth a look if you want to try something different.

Blizzard has at last released the third and final installment of its Nova Covert Ops story DLC. Having waiting for all three parts, I played through it all in one go.

Despite the fact Nova is one of my favourite characters from all of fiction, I admit I had a fair degree of trepidation going into Covert Ops. Legacy of the Void was a really tough act to follow, and with DLC there’s always the concern that quality will drop, that it will turn out to be just a cheap cash grab.

I shouldn’t have worried.

Rogue agent!

As revealed in its initial trailer, Covert Ops begins with Nova awakening in a mysterious lab, with her memory wiped. A message on her visor warns her of imminent danger, spurring her to enact a daring escape from her mysterious captors.

What follows is a blisteringly fast-paced adventure as Nova discovers a conspiracy that threatens to bring the Terran Dominion to its knees and cost countless innocent lives.

In practical terms this takes the form of a nine mission campaign in which the player commands both Nova herself and the elite black ops forces under her command.

As with previous StarCraft II campaigns, there are unique progression mechanics that allow your troops to grow in power and gain new options as the campaign progresses. In this case, the mechanic is equipment, for both Nova and her units.

Nova herself can choose from a variety of guns, gadgets, and different types of armour to radically alter her stats and abilities. Weapons include everything from her standard sniper rifle to a shotgun, a lightsaber, and even more exotic options still, while different armours can boost her energy, permanently cloak her, or even grant her the use of a jetpack similar to those used by reapers.

Unit equipment is a little different. There’s a shared pool of upgrades, but each upgrade can only be equipped to one unit type. If your siege tanks have spider mines, no other units can equip spider mines. Certain upgrades can have different effects depending on the unit, too, so it’s important to check all the possible combinations.

The number of options is impressive, especially for such a short campaign. If you factor all the possible combinations of different guns and gadgets Nova can equip, there are in essence a few dozen different versions of Nova you can play with — at least. Want to be a tanky melee brawler? Go for it. Want to be a stealthy ranged sniper? Also cool. Want to dance up and down cliffs, hurling grenades left and right? Yeah, you can do that too. And that’s not even the limit of all the different things Nova can do.

The mission design takes this versatility into account, too. Some missions have been specifically designed to have many different potential strategies that can lead to victory, from stealth to brute force and everything in between. The amount of thought that has gone into some missions is truly impressive.

Mission design has always been one of StarCraft II’s greatest strengths, and even after all this time, they’re still coming up with creative new ideas. Highlights this time included a high speed getaway on a vulture bike that practically turned StarCraft into a driving game, and a very clever mission that played out almost like a choose your own adventure novel, allowing you to dictate what to face and how the mission would play out. Incredibly clever.

And that’s without even getting into the seamless way the campaign blends between traditional RTS gameplay, RPG segments (including some epic and intense boss fights), and more exotic sequences like the aforementioned vulture scene.

There’s a still a certain bias towards shorter missions and missions with hard time limits, but there are also a few that take a more sedate pace, and overall the campaign feels pretty well-balanced.

They didn’t skimp on the difficulty, either. I was only playing on hard, but even so the final missions were incredibly nail-biting. As I’m writing this, I still haven’t entirely come off my adrenaline high.

Of course you can always play on lower difficulties if you’re not in the mood to test yourself too much, but if you want to push your skills to the limit, Covert Ops definitely delivers.

The past doesn’t matter:

Covert Ops is virtually flawless from a game mechanics perspective, but it doesn’t disappoint on the artistic front, either.

Visually it’s a great experience. The graphical fidelity of Blizzard’s cutscenes just keeps getting higher, and there’s plenty of them to enjoy.

The in-game graphics are holding their own, too. Blizzard’s good at giving their games ageless artstyles, so while StarCraft II is a few years old now, it doesn’t look it, and they’re still making improvements. In a ruined cityscape, skyscrapers fall to form bridges over chasms. On an ice world, you can see frost form on your units’ armour.

The music is also excellent. In a departure from the guitar-heavy sounds we’re used to from the Terrans, Covert Ops’ soundtrack leans more on synth and orchestral sounds reminiscent of Mass Effect (yet another case of overlap between the two franchises — seriously, I just learned there’s a ship in Andromeda called the Hyperion; come on, man).

The story is, in a word, fun. It’s very intense and thrilling, with little chance to catch your breath, and it captures the cool factor of being an elite ghost operative very well.

And while the focus is on Nova, there are plenty of appearances by other familiar faces. At this point I just can’t help but smile whenever I hear the familiar guitar strums and Swann shows up to drop off a new toy. It’s Pavlovian.

It’s not all Terrans making cameos, either…

Although it’s very different in a lot of ways, there’s a quality about Covert Ops that reminds me of Mass Effect’s Citadel DLC a bit. There’s that same feeling of a final gift to the fans.

There are a lot of little things that add flavour, too. Study the maps on your briefing screen and you’ll find interesting little factoids about local landmarks and the history of whatever world you’re on.

I love things like that. It’s the small details that really make games come alive.

A lot of the twists and reveals are easy to see coming, especially if you know StarCraft lore, but there is one reversal near the end that caught me off guard in a very welcome way.

If I’m being honest, there are some flaws in the story. While it’s not as rushed as I worried it might be going in, it’s still kind of rushed. There’s isn’t a whole lot of time to flesh out the characters, so they tend to feel a bit flat.

Even Nova herself doesn’t get as much development as you might expect. Nova’s a very deep character with a lot of complexity, but you don’t really see that in Covert Ops. If you haven’t read the books, you might not be able to readily understand why she behaves as she does in the story.

If I’m to continue being honest, though, I’m not sure I care. Maybe these flaws will begin to rankle me after I’ve had time to digest, but right now the sheer cool factor of Covert Ops is enough to make me forgive any sins.

The cold, analytical part of my mind is pointing out ways it could be better, but the rest of me is like, “I JUST VAPOURIZED HALF A BATTALION WITH A PLASMA RIFLE, AND NOW I’M MIND-CONTROLLING THE SURVIVORS INTO MURDERING EACH OTHER. THIS IS SO $%@#ING AWESOME.”

And I love Nova. I always have. It’s lovely to see her finally get a starring role in-game.

Overall rating: 8.9/10

It amazes me that more than five years after its initial release, StarCraft II is still innovating, providing experiences that are as good as anything in gaming, and generally making the rest of Blizzard look bad.

It does sadden me a bit that there are no current plans for any more mission packs, but I suppose all good things must come to an end. Over the past few years, we’ve gotten nearly a hundred missions of StarCraft II story, so even if this does turn out to be the last of it, you can’t say we haven’t gotten our money’s worth.

It’s been a hell of a ride.

One nice thing about starting on Knights of the Fallen Empire so late is that I didn’t have long to wait for Star Wars: The Old Republic’s next expansion, Knights of the Eternal Throne. I’ve also been subscribed long enough to qualify for early access, so while the expansion didn’t officially launch until yesterday, I’ve already finished.

Against the empress:

Knights of the Eternal Throne is so much a continuation of Fallen Empire’s story I’m not sure why they even bothered to label it a separate expansion.

The war against the Eternal Empire enters a dangerous new phase as Valkorion’s strongest and most depraved child usurps the Eternal Throne. The focus this time is on Vaylin, and I gotta say, she’s a much better antagonist than Arcann ever was.

Vaylin manages the incredible trick of being both hideously, irredeemably evil, and yet somehow still something of a tragic figure. Maybe she was never entirely stable, but her father robbed her of any chance she ever had to be a whole person. She’s a monster, and she has to be stopped, but yet I still spent a lot of the story feeling sorry for her.

Plus, Natasha Loring does an absolutely fantastic job voicing her. Probably one of the better vocal performances I’ve heard in a game.

It’s not entirely the Vaylin Show, though. There’s lots of other intrigues and plots going at the same time.

There’s a school of thought that says that Disney declaring most of Star Wars’ extended universe non-canon is a good thing, because it frees the EU properties to chart their own course more than ever before.

I’m wondering if KotET is an example of that, because more than ever SW:TOR is developing its own unique mythology that is very different from and honestly better than the world of the movies. At one point in this expansion I found myself caught in the civil war between two hyper-advanced AIs in a post-apocalyptic Dyson Sphere. There’s nothing like that in the movies.

I also very much like that KotET spent some time revisiting familiar locations and plot threads from the base game. One flaw of Fallen Empire was that it felt so utterly disconnected from what came before, but Eternal Throne makes an admirable attempt at bridging that gap.

Also, this is probably the first time in the game the Sith Empire has been portrayed in a more positive light than the Republic, and as an Empire fan, I’m pretty happy with that.

They did a good job of making it all fit together, too. Despite pursuing several plot threads at once, KotET is a very tight, very focused experience, and for the most part it’s an epic thrill-ride from beginning to end. The only significant stumble was chapter eight, which was mostly just an endless slog through mob-filled wilderness in an attempt to pad out what would otherwise be a very brief chapter.

It is a very short storyline, but it’s well-paced, so it doesn’t feel rushed, and it only costs $15, so it’s hard to argue you aren’t getting your money’s worth.

Choices felt a lot more impactful this time, too. Reading up after finishing the story, it seems there’s quite a lot that could have turned out differently if I’d made different choices. Should be good for playing alts.

Alongside the Alliance:

Something that’s a bit more mixed is how Eternal Throne has treated the issue of companions.

No additional companions from the base game were brought back this time. I can see why they did that, because it did make for a smoother and more focused story, but at the same time there are still a couple of companions I’d really like back. I guess it’s kind of a no win scenario.

They did spend more time on the previously returned class companions than I thought they would, though. Well, Vette and Torian get a lot of screentime, anyway.

I’m also of two minds on how the ongoing romance with Lana Beniko was treated this time.

To be blunt, it’s barely there. There are no actual romance scenes; just some extra or different lines of dialogue that are few and far between. I have to ask myself if it was even worth the trouble of establishing the romance in the first place if it’s going to be so neglected.

On the other hand, minimal though it may be, I did think the romance content was really well done. I find Lana’s fretting whenever you’re in danger very endearing, and there’s one moment in particular that really stood out.

Without spoiling too much, there’s a scene where you’re heading into a place full of Force-related nastiness, and it’s bad enough that even Lana, normally icy calm, is starting to lose it. If you romance her, there’s an option to tell her, “I’ll be with you the whole time.” And it just felt so sweet, and so real. I think it might be one of my favourite moments from any Bioware romance to date.

I’m torn. I generally say I prefer quality over quantity, but Lana’s romance in KotET is a rather severe application of that principle.

My biggest complaint about Fallen Empire, having no choice in what companion you use when, also returns, though in this case it didn’t bother me as much. Partly because they did a better job of justifying it from a story perspective, and partly because you spend most of your time with Lana or Vette, which is more or less who I would have picked regardless.

Claiming your prize:

There’s something else that gives me mixed feelings. Normally I’d say it’s a big spoiler, but they’ve been telegraphing it so heavily it’s hard to call it a surprise at this point. If you’re determined to go in fresh, I suppose you should stop reading now, but honestly if you’ve been paying any kind of attention to SW:TOR lately, you had to know this was coming.

Knights of the Eternal Throne ends with the player claiming the titular seat, which pretty makes them the ruler of the universe.

Now, it’s hard to deny the cool factor of that, or how viscerally satisfying it is to receive such an epic reward for all that you’ve done.

But I do have to wonder where they go from here. How do you escalate from, “You are the all-powerful lord and master of the galaxy”? Can you top that? Will they be forced to just hit the reset button on the story (again)?

It’s a little bit of awkward fit for my character especially. She’s a spy, used to lurking in the shadows rather than leading in the open, and my entire backstory for her is based on her desire to be a servant of a greater cause. Now she’s a great cause unto herself, and I’m not sure how to adjust.

Marching into the future:

Something else that needs to be highlighted about Knights of the Eternal Throne is how much it’s improved the fundamental components of the game.

For one thing, the graphics continue to improve. Environments are looking ever better, and I noticed another sharp uptake in the quality of cutscenes. Many of them are quite spectacular, and almost as thrilling as what you’d see in the Star Wars movies.

Even outside of cutscenes, the game is becoming more cinematic. We’re starting to see things like terrain changes in real time — like a bridge exploding as you try to cross it.

Character models are also getting much better, though this can create a jarring disconnect. New characters like Empress Acina look almost real, while my own character still looks like she’s made out of Plasticine. It’s distracting, to say the least.

They did implement new facial animations for characters both old and new, though it’s a bit of a mixed blessing. It does add more personality, but it can get a bit uncanny valley in places. Lana’s shocked face doesn’t really communicate what it was probably intended to.

Bioware also put a lot more effort into game mechanics this time. SW:TOR now features vehicle mechanics, allowing players to pilot walkers against the forces of the Eternal Empire, among other things. They’re not the greatest vehicle sequences I’ve seen in an MMO, but it’s a good thing for the game to have going forward. Opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.

One thing I did enjoy that was very different is one chapter that was devoted almost entirely to puzzle-solving, something the game hasn’t really seen before. They’re relatively simple puzzles, but it still turned out to be a pretty fun, clever chapter.

Finally, core class mechanics and combat seemed a little better, at least for the Imperial agent. Cutting out a few of the more irrelevant abilities and offering a talent to let me cast lethal shot while moving are small but welcome steps towards improving the otherwise dull core gameplay of The Old Republic.

At a fundamental level, as a game, Knights of the Eternal Throne is a significant improvement over what’s come before.

There has been a lot of controversy around the new Galactic Command progression system, but while it’s probably a downgrade from what we had before, it’s still better than what a lot of MMOs offer, and honestly I think the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. I got several powerful upgrades and useful items out of it just by playing through the story normally.

And let’s be real here: Who’s playing SW:TOR for the gear grind endgame at this point? It’s like playing TSW for the PvP, or EVE for the story. Sure, you can, but…

I’d be more concerned with new the Dark vs Light system, honestly. It’s very poorly explained, and from what I’ve seen so far, the Light Side seems to win every single time.

* * *

Overall, while it’s not perfect, I’d consider Knights of the Eternal Throne an improvement over Fallen Empire, and a pretty good experience through and through.

Blizzard has what I’m going to call an inconsistent history with its portrayal of women in its games. There’s been a lot of criticism thrown at them over the years, and a lot of is quite justified (some cases I may disagree with), but they’ve also created some pretty interesting female characters over the years.

Today I want to look at how the StarCraft franchise in particular has portrayed its female inhabitants over the years, because I think that’s been a pretty fascinating evolution.

Before I go any further, I will offer the caveat that I am a dude and that my opinions on issues relating to women should be taken with a grain of salt. I try to be sensitive and understanding, but obviously I lack the level of perspective and investment a woman would have for issues such as the portrayal of female characters in the media. What follows is my viewpoint; you are welcome to disagree.

In the beginning:

The first StarCraft game had a grand total of one female character. Now, to be fair, she was a pretty huge part of the story, but I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t a heavily male-dominated game.

Similarly, there was only one female unit in the game (well, two if you count Zerg queens): the Terran dropship.

However, even as early as the Brood War expansion, things were starting to change, if only slightly.

The number of major female characters in the story doubled with the introduction of Raszagal, who was also the first female Protoss we encountered.

This is somewhat significant because video games have a bad habit of only ever showing us one sex of non-human races (the neglected sex almost always being female). After twenty years, we still haven’t seen a female Ogre in Warcraft, and even Mass Effect took until the third game to show us a female Turian, and then only in DLC.

Raszagal was ultimately something of a weak character, but Brood War as a whole was devoted almost entirely to building up Kerrigan as a character — albeit in a very poorly written way that did more to make the other characters look stupid than to make her seem impressive. But, still, she was the star of the game, however mishandled the story may have actually been.

Brood War also began introducing more female combat units, though it was only two — both Terran, and one just a cheesy collection of “sexy nurse” cliches. Valkyries were pretty badass, at least.

Brood War gave a lot more attention to women than the base game had, but StarCraft as a whole remained a game mostly defined by its male characters. It would take until much later for more significant changes to take place.

Between games:

Some mention needs to be made of Nova and her rather strange saga.

Nova was to have starred in her own game, a shooter called StarCraft: Ghost, but it was cancelled before its release. However, she was not forgotten, by fans or by Blizzard.

Nova’s first appearance to be released to the public was the novel that bears her name by Keith R.A. Decandido. This established her as not only one of my favourite characters from the StarCraft universe, but also one of my all-time favourite characters in all of fiction, a complicated yet lovable and just downright cool person.

Nova would go on to star in quite a lot of tie-in fiction and become an icon for the franchise, though it would be a while before she took a major role in-game (more on that later). I’ve also previously pointed to her as a good example of sex appeal done right.

Also on the subject of tie-in fiction, I’d like to take note of R.M. Dahl of Christie Golden’s Dark Templar trilogy. Although she did not have any real appearances outside of the trilogy (bar her terribly ill-conceived cameo as a damsel in distress in Project Blackstone), R.M. is like Nova in that she became one of my most beloved characters. I always respect an author who can make me love a character I initially hated, and that’s R.M. in a nutshell. She’s a very complex person with a lot of layers.

Note to self: Reread those books sometime soon.

Hell, it’s about time:

StarCraft II is where I start to see big changes taking place, though I’ll definitely grant it’s not a perfect track record.

Wings of Liberty was still mostly the guys’ story, I admit. And there’s the utterly cringe-worthy Ariel Hanson to consider. It was Nova’s first appearance in-game, but she didn’t exactly do much.

They did start including more female units, though. Still a minority, but more than the original game launched with. For some reason the banshee pilot seems to strike a cord with people especially.

Heart of the Swarm was a mixed bag. On the one hand, Kerrigan took center stage again, and there were some prominent female characters among the supporting cast — though I’m not sure Izha should count anymore the Terran adjutant does.

On the other, the ending of the game could be considered kind of problematic, with some of Kerrigan’s thunder stolen at the finish line. I have a strong recollection of the profane rant I got from one of my feminist friends after she finished the game.

I don’t think it’s quite as bad as she did, but I can sympathize with the perspective, and I have my own problems with HotS’ ending, so I’m not going to waste much energy defending it.

Heart of the Swarm did add another female unit to players’ armies, though, in the form of the Protoss oracle — which is good because Protoss females have traditionally been very underrepresented in-game.

And that brings us to Legacy of the Void, which saw an explosion in the number and prominence of Protoss women in the story. Selendis unfortunately did not get the big role I’d hoped to see for her since her small appearance in Wings of Liberty, but we were introduced to Vorazun, Talis, Rohana, and Ji’nara.

I really like how Protoss women are portrayed. So far as I can recall, at no point in the entire StarCraft franchise have Protoss females been treated in any way differently from their male counterparts. It would appear the Protoss have achieved — or always had — perfect gender equality.

They’re not treated differently by the writers, either. Protoss women are, without exception, every bit as proud and formidable as the men.

I’m also quite fond of their art design. There’s a definite feminine quality to their appearance, and you can readily tell the difference between Protoss males and females at a glance, but they haven’t been sexed up or otherwise made to appeal to human ideals of beauty. They still look decidedly alien.

This stands in stark contrast to the ludicrous sexual dimorphism that you tend to find in the Warcraft universe — especially with the Draenei, whose males and females do not appear to even be from the same species.

I suppose you could make an issue of the fact that all these Protoss women are still largely playing second fiddle to the male characters — Selendis and Vorazun sort of share the role of Artanis’ sidekick, and Ji’nara is obviously second to Alarak — but they are all powerful and interesting characters in their own right.

Vorazun may be second to Artanis in the overall Hierarchy, but she is the sovereign ruler of her own people, and Artanis has been shown to trust her to lead the Daelaam in his absence. And frankly she’s a far more interesting character than Artanis ever was.

Meanwhile, Selendis is the commander of the Golden Armada, Ji’nara is a heartbeat away from ruling the Tal’darim, and Rohana is the only character shown to be strong enough to resist Amon’s direct influence.

There’s also a fairly credible fan theory that Selendis was the player character in Brood War’s Protoss campaign, similar to how Artanis was the player character in the base game. This isn’t confirmed, though.

We shouldn’t forget the ending of Legacy of the Void, either, which I think served as redemption for the mistakes of Heart of the Swarm.

Outside the main story, LotV introduced more female units — the liberator for Terran and the adept for Protoss — and the co-op mode, which prominently features several women as playable characters or mission contacts.

Finally, there’s the Covert Ops DLC. That was, in fact, the main inspiration for this post, as it undoubtedly gave more attention to women than ever before in StarCraft – or arguably any Blizzard game.

Obviously Nova was the hero, and she did nothing but kick ass and take names the whole time, but the villain was also a woman. Not exactly unexplored territory for StarCraft, but it was interesting to see a story that was entirely about the conflict between two women. That’s not something Blizzard’s done a lot of.

It also struck me how many women there were in more minor and incidental roles throughout Covert Ops. The Defenders of Man pilot on Tyrador, Horner’s lieutenant on Borea, Kate Lockwell on the news, and so forth.

It’s certainly a milestone for a franchise that began its life with one solitary female character.

* * *

There are two main points I’m trying to make here.

1: I really like StarCraft.

2: Blizzard has made a lot of mistakes in how it handles its female characters, and that deserves to be criticized, but I think they are making a genuine effort to do better, and I think that, too, deserves recognition.

I continue my march toward legendary status in Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’ve now completed the smuggler story.

The heist:

On paper, the smuggler was the class that least appealed to me, and in a sense, I was right. It is pretty much a collection of all the sorts of tropes I normally don’t like — over the top lovable rogues, selfish criminals as protagonists, and so forth.

It’s just that the story is told with so much wit and charm that it won me over anyway.

Of all the class stories I’ve played to date — which is nearly all of them now — the smuggler puts by far the most emphasis on humour. Others have had occasional moments of levity — the warrior story especially — but the smuggler story is pure comedy. Which is probably a good thing, because otherwise the story of a selfish idiot somehow stumbling into conquering the galactic underworld and saving the Republic would be a pretty hard to swallow.

I do credit a lot of the story’s success to the voice actress who plays the female smuggler. The entire story is pretty much just her putting on a master class in snark and smugness, and it’s just delightful.

I was also once again amused by the maturity of the content in the smuggler story — even if some of it is a pretty immature sort of maturity. At one point I somehow wound up debating the villain about the size of my companion’s Johnson. I may not have been romancing him, but I wasn’t about to let the good name of Corso’s dingus get dragged through the mud.

Also I killed a Hutt by throwing a grenade down his throat. So there’s that.

This was also the first class I’ve played mainly dark side (though I still made more than a few light choices). Just seemed to make sense to bit a more ruthless and selfish than usual on this class.

Smuggler is another class story whose best chapter is definitely the first. The good news, though, is that its quality doesn’t fall off a cliff the way it did for the inquisitor.

Chapter two and the first bit of chapter three are a bit dull, but it’s all part of setting up something pretty interesting (best I can do without major spoilers), so it works out in the end.

Part of the problem is they start trying to tie the smuggler’s journey into galactic politics and the like. It sort of makes sense for them to do that in an MMO, but it’s an awkward fit for a class whose whole identity is based around being a petty criminal.

I’m definitely glad I was able to skip everything but the class missions. I can’t imagine how you could logically justify doing all the other content as a smuggler.

Must be even worse in the expansions. Parts of the Eternal Empire story felt a bit awkward as an agent, but as a smuggler, it all must be patently ridiculous.

The crew:

Smuggler has very good luck when it comes to companions, compared to most classes. While none of them are quite as amazing as, say, Vette or Nadia, they’re mostly likable, and smuggler is the only class I’ve played who don’t have any companions I strongly dislike.

Corso was probably my favourite. Yeah, his over the top folksiness can be a bit much sometimes, but mostly he’s so decent and good-natured it’s pretty hard for him to not get under your skin a bit. He reminds me of nothing so much as a big, dumb puppy following you around.

I decided not to romance him on the grounds he didn’t seem like a natural match for my smuggler, but they still had a pretty warm, compelling relationship. Interestingly, it seems like Corso will develop feelings for a female smuggler regardless of whether you choose to flirt with him. He never said so in so many words, but he got really jealous whenever I flirted with other guys, and his feelings for the player character seem pretty deep.

He also has a lot of hilarious interjections when you bring him along on missions — nearly as many as Vette.

Smuggler: “Why do people always assume the worst about me?”

Corso: “I’ve been wonderin’ that mahself. I think it’s got somethin’ to do with the hair.”

The others are mostly a good lot, too, though. Risha’s not the most warm or lovable person, but I liked her “girlfriend” dynamic with my smuggler. I can just see them planning their next robbery while they do their nails or something. Bit of a shame her story never really gets a proper resolution, though.

One other interesting thing about Risha is the fact she’s probably the most clear example yet of crossover between different class stories. If you’ve only played the smuggler story, Risha’s history will be a big question mark at first, but if you’ve played the warrior story, you already know quite a lot about her and her big reveal.

Gus is kind of amusing, and I like the “failed Jedi” angle. It’s an interesting take on the Star Wars lore — obviously not every Force wielder is going to be good at it, but you never think about the washouts. They could have done more with him, though. He suffers from the lateness of his introduction to the story.

Bowdaar can be a bit irritating just because Wookie screeching gets hard on the ears after a while, but if you can get past the noise, he’s a fairly compelling character otherwise.

Akaavi is the only weak link in the chain. She’s as dull and one-dimensional as every other Mandalorian I’ve met in this game to date. Would still take her over Kaliyo, Jorgan, or Zenith, though, that’s for sure.

The next job:

I still have two more class stories to do: knight and bounty hunter. I’m also tempted to play more of the expansion content on my alts — I miss playing my warrior.

I think that stuff can wait though. I’ve been playing a lot of SW:TOR for a while now, and I’m starting to feel a bit burnt out. Boy am I ever sick of Hoth, let me tell you.

So I think it may be time for me to take a break. Maybe not a long break — maybe just a few weeks. We’ll see. But I want to play something else for a bit.

I tried really hard to give this book the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, there were warning signs early on. Little things that were wrong, that showed an author who hadn’t done their research. Since when does Valerian Mengsk of all fekking people use casual slang?

Still, I didn’t want to judge too harshly out of the gate. This was Timothy Zahn’s first book in the StarCraft universe, and besides, a few hiccups here and there aren’t the end of the world. Knaak’s writing can be a little rough, too, but I usually end up enjoying his stuff all the same.

I did a double-take when I realized that most of the new characters had received little to no physical description, forcing me to conjure my own images of them out of whole cloth. (I decided Tanya has red hair because she’s a ghost and, y’know, Kerrigan and all.) That should have been a pretty big red flag right there.

But StarCraft has had a really good run over the past year or two. Everything that’s been released in-game has been excellent, pretty much without exception, and it’s felt like the franchise has entered a golden age, like it can do no wrong.

So I pressed on. And I kept pressing on, until the end of the book, at which point I had no choice but to admit the truth: Evolution is a sloppy, dull book written by someone who appears to have little to no understanding of the StarCraft universe or its characters.

Evolution presents a rather bizarre scenario. It involves an attempt at a peace conference between the Swarm, the Dominion, and the Daelaam Protoss. What’s even more shocking is that the conference was orchestrated by the Zerg, by Zagara herself.

Zagara claims she wants to usher in a new era of peace in the Koprulu Sector, and to prove her intentions she’s used the Zerg mastery of bio-engineering to bring life to a formerly dead world. She promises do the same on Terran and Protoss worlds, to heal the scars wrought by the End War.

To test the truth of her claims, Emperor Valerian sends a survey team to the surface, including a surprisingly chill reaper, an underachieving pyrokinetic ghost, a scientist, a mysterious Protoss exile, and Generic Meathead Marine Dude #24601. It soon becomes clear to the survey team that sinister forces are at work on the newly green world, and tensions run high on all sides as a new war seems increasingly likely.

It’s a pretty weird premise, and a bit hard to swallow at first, but ultimately it’s the execution far more so than the concept that drags Evolution down.

And to be fair, it’s not entirely bad. Some of the new creatures and concepts introduced are pretty cool from a strictly sci-fi perspective, and if these plot threads are ever revisited (hopefully by a different author), they could go interesting places.

Some of the new characters aren’t bad, either. They’re no R.M. Dahl or Mike Liberty, but they’re not without their charm. Tanya, the ghost, is kind of cool, and I love the nickname the other ghosts gave her: Pyrokeet.

The pre-existing characters, though, are a mess. I’ve already said that Valerian’s speech pattern was all wrong, and Horner displayed basically zero personality through the whole thing.

Abathur, though, is the real travesty here. The author does not understand Abathur at all. He acts so wildly, absurdly out of character in this book that it’s just intolerable. I clearly remember dialogue in Heart of the Swarm that directly and completely contradicts all of Abathur’s behaviour in this book.

Artanis feels right, but really, how hard is it to write for Artanis? The man isn’t exactly complicated.

And there’s no shortage of things that are far-fetched, or just straight up don’t make sense. Like how an interstellar transport takes about eight hours just to cross one planet for some fekking reason.

The only real silver lining here is that Evolution doesn’t seem that relevant to the ongoing story. Normally this would be a bad thing, but this book is such a mess I’m glad it’s not super likely to have a lasting impact of the course of the StarCraft universe.

I wouldn’t mind seeing more stories about the adostra, but please, Blizzard, get Christie Golden to write them.

In the end, Evolution is a wreck, but it’s a pretty self-contained wreck. It’s not enough to spoil StarCraft’s current golden age.

Some of the StarCraft novels have been truly excellent, and are among the best sci-fi books I’ve ever read. This isn’t one of them.

At least it was better than Speed of Darkness.

Overall rating: 4.1/10

I have now returned from my short holiday blogging break. As always, the holidays brought with them a wealth of in-game events in various titles, so it was a time for me to go full game-hopper. Here’s a sampling of some of the more interesting things I did over the holidays.

Elder Scrolls Online: New Life Festival

I had already been thinking of getting back into ESO, and the newly implemented holiday event provided the perfect excuse.

Like the rest of ESO, the New Life Festival isn’t amazing but nonetheless has a certain charm. It definitely doesn’t give one much cause for complaint, managing to avoid most of the pitfalls outlined in my recent article on MMO holidays.

The event’s hub is a Nord woman named Breda in Eastmarch, who sends you on daily quests relating to the nine main playable races and their unique holiday practices. It’s not exactly thrilling, but it does add a nice texture to the world.

Naturally the Aldmeri quests are the best. The Bosmer quest wins for most fun, allowing you to toss mudballs* at basically anyone, be they players or NPCs, up to and including Queen Ayrenn herself. Now, I quite like Ayrenn, and my character is rather fond of her too, but when you have the chance to chuck a wad of mud at the high and mighty queen of the Altmer, you take it.

*(I guess when you live in a place that doesn’t get snow you make do.)

Meanwhile, the Altmer quest is a bit dull but very quick and farmable, and the Khajiit quest is a nice mix of fun and convenience. It involves stealing things because of course it does.

That said, the Breton quest is kind of cool, and the Nord one is also fun, if a little on the longer side compared to some of the other dailies. Really the only bad ones are the Dunmer quest (fun concept but way longer than it needs be) and the Argonian quest (ew fishing).

My only minor grievance would be that the event does involve a lot of travel. If you’ve already explored all the zones where quests take place (which is nearly all of them), you can use wayshrines to save a lot of time, but if not… I’m very glad of that spurt of exploration I had recently; saved me a lot of time during the event.

It does illustrate the potential inherent in One Tamriel, at least. It’s great to see an MMO utilizing all of its game world; makes it feel like a real place.

It’s also a fairly rewarding event, especially when you consider the double XP buff you can get from Breda’s keg (which I wish I had learned about earlier in the event). You can get pretty respectable amounts of gold and XP from the dailies, and they also drop holiday loot at a pretty generous rate. With the help of a little trading, I got nearly everything I wanted in the first two days.

On that note, one significant piece of loot is the Nordic Bather’s Towel costume. I have been considering it as a potential new go-to outfit for my Bosmer.

Normally I avoid revealing gear in games, but in the case of the Bosmer, it seems to make sense to invoke a more barbaric aesthetic. She’s a barely civilized cannibal from the deep jungle; it just doesn’t add up for her to be in full plate or something. And despite the name, the towel actually works pretty well as a sort of barbaric kilt look.

Then again, it is really revealing. I’d like a more savage style of armour, but I’d still like it to be armour, which the towel isn’t. At least it shows off her tattoos…

Bleh. The Argonian low level tops are exactly what I want, but I’m about to outlevel them. Why doesn’t this game have a bloody wardrobe? What kind of game doesn’t have a wardrobe in this day and age?

If nothing else, I guess she’s now equipped to defend herself from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

Heroes of the Storm: Varian impressions

I’ve barely touched Heroes over the last few months, but Varian is a character I’ve loved for years, and I’ve wanted him in Heroes of the Storm for a very long time, so when he came up on a free rotation coinciding with a holiday XP boost, I knew I had to give him a shot.

The interesting thing about Varian is that you would think he’d be a very complicated character, being the game’s first multiclass hero, but he’s actually quite mechanically simple.

He’s still theoretically complex because he is basically three characters in one, but once you’ve decided which build you’re going for, his actual ability toolkit and moment to moment gameplay are very simple.

I actually think he’d be a good choice for newer players because the simplicity of his kit allows you to focus a lot more on the fundamentals of the game — positioning, team play, and the like. There’s a certain purity to his playstyle that’s very charming. No gimmicks, no tricks, just charge in and bring the pain.

I tended to prefer his Twin Blades of Fury self-healing build — I found it to be both very fun and very powerful. Reminded me of how Valla used to be, except melee.

His tank build seems decent, too, though the range on Taunt really needs to be longer. I almost never got to use it because I was never in range when it counted.

That said, though, I’m still feeling pretty burnt out on Heroes, so after getting Varian to level five, I’m now on another indefinite hiatus from the game.

The Secret World: Same old, same old

Didn’t spend a whole lot of time in TSW this year. The holiday event was pretty much the same as previous years, with only a few very minor new additions. I did a few Super Hels and bought my usual party bag, but that’s about it.

There is one interesting thing to come out of this year’s event, but that deserves a post of its own…

Titan Quest: Not quite…

While it’s not holiday-related, one other thing that’s worth mentioning here, if only because it wouldn’t fill a whole post on its own, is that I finally cleared out the last of my Steam backlog by giving Titan Quest a go.

Titan Quest is an older game that recently got a remastered edition. The new version launched at a generous discount, so I figured it was worth a try, especially since Titan Quest is a game I’ve been mildly curious about for a while. On paper, it’s a game right up my alley: an action RPG based on ancient mythology.

The game does have a lot going for it, and it left a pretty good first impression. The graphics in the remastered version are gorgeous, and I was really glad to see that they seemed to have done their research in regards to the mythologies the game is based on. They actually know it’s Herakles, not Hercules!

There’s also a “build your own class” system wherein you can combine any two skill trees out of a long list of possibilities that I think is at least theoretically interesting.

I enjoyed my first few hours in Titan Quest, but over time, the game’s old school obnoxiousness really started to wear me down. Boss mechanics weren’t really a thing in those days, so the average boss fight tended to involve nothing but holding down the left mouse button and hitting the healing potion button on cooldown.

For, like, three minutes straight.

What really dragged me down, though, was the agonizingly slow pace of character progression. Leveling is slow, and there just never seems to be enough skill points to do everything you want. Not only do you need to spend points to unlock abilities, but you also need to keep investing large amount of points to keep your abilities up to par, and you need to invest points separately into the skill tree itself to unlock later abilities. Points spent on abilities don’t count toward advancing the skill tree for some incomprehensible reason.

I didn’t feel like I was building the awesome character I wanted to. I just felt like I was constantly trying to play catch-up and never really getting anywhere. A feeling I remember being common in older RPGs.

So as it stands now I don’t think I’m going to continue with Titan Quest. It’s a shame, because there is quite a lot about the game I genuinely like.

If nothing else it was good to confirm that my memories of older RPGs are in fact accurate and that RPGs actually are much better nowadays.

And finally…

I have also had another article published at MMO Bro: a guide to taking great MMO screenshots.

Since starting blogging, taking screenshots has become something of a crippling obsession oh gods help me hobby for me, and I’ve had a lot of time to practice taking good shots. I now pass my wisdom on to you.

At least some of these tips should apply to single-player games, too, if you’re not an MMO fanatic.

Being a long-time Douglas Adams fan (as you all should be), I was excited to see a TV adaptation of his novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency appear on Netflix and started watching almost immediately.

It didn’t blow me away out of the gate, though. It was a strange, confusing show that didn’t seem to have much to do with the Dirk Gently story I know. I almost gave up on the show after the first two episodes, but something about it stuck with me, and I decided to give it another shot.

This turned out to be a good call.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a very, very strange show. Far stranger than I have the ability to adequately communicate through a mere blog post, and almost certainly the strangest television show I’ve ever seen.

It’s also almost entirely unlike the book it’s supposedly based upon. Really the only common threads are Dirk himself (and even he’s changed somewhat compared to the books) and the underlying concept of the holistic detective and the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things.”

So much has been changed that the show is now a totally different genre. While the book was a lighthearted comedy, the show is definitely a drama, and a surprisingly dark and sometimes gory one at that. It’s not without occasional moments of levity, but it’s definitely more serious than silly.

Still, I’ve never been much of a purist. I generally try to judge each incarnation of a story on its own merits, and while the TV Dirk Gently is a radical departure from its source material, it manages to be pretty interesting in its own strange way.

And it is strange. I can’t overstate that. This show is just so weird. I don’t know if I could even attempt to summarize the plot, but it involves a kitten, a shark, time travel, anarchist energy vampires, and an heiress/corgi.

Alison Thornton plays dog very well. She’s very convincing as a corgi.

Early on, I was turned off by the show’s surprisingly gritty tone, by how different it was from the books, and how unrelentingly strange it was. However, over time, it began to grow on me.

There are a few reasons for this. The main cast members are all pretty likable and managed to feel pretty convincing as real people despite the oddness of the situations they find themselves in. Dirk is pretty bizarre, but that’s the point, and he’s entertaining.

Dirk is obviously the main character, but much of the story is told from the perspective of Todd, his hapless “assistant,” played by Elijah Wood of Lord of the Rings fame. Rounding out the core protagonists are Farah, a highly competent but not entirely confident bodyguard, and Amanda, Todd’s punk rocker sister, who suffers from a severe mental illness involving frequent and painful hallucinations.

There’s also a side plot following a strange woman named Bart, a holistic assassin who utilizes a method similar to Dirk’s (IE just wandering around doing random things for no reason) but with a lot more murdering.

What really started to hook me in, though, was the realization that the show does share one important quality with its source material.

As popular as he is, I don’t think Douglas Adams gets enough credit. His books aren’t just fun; they’re brilliant. When you start to analyze his books, you realize there’s an incredible depth and complexity to many of them.

Douglas Adams books always began with numerous bizarre, seemingly unrelated plot threads. It would seem like he was just rambling without purpose. Then, slowly, all the threads would begin to come together, and gradually you would realize that it was all connected, that he had a grand plan behind everything. What began as chaos became a symphony.

The Dirk Gently TV series has that same quality. At first, it seems like nothing but an incomprehensible spray of random, nonsensical events. Over the course of the season, you will begin to see the connections form, to see events align, and eventually every question will be answered, every loose thread tied together into a grand and beautiful whole.

As a writer, it leaves me awestruck. I could never write something like this.

There are still things that bother me about the show. The biggest is that I really dislike the attempt to give something approaching a rational explanation to Dirk’s abilities — the mystery is his whole charm — and the very cliche plots that spring from this explanation.

Still, a show that I initially met with profound skepticism has won me over. I got more into the series with every episode, the season finale was spectacular, and I’m looking forward to season two.

Also, “Two Sane Guys Doing Normal Things” is going down as one of my all-time favourite TV episode titles.

The StarCraft II trilogy has now wrapped up, and Blizzard doesn’t seem to have any immediate plans for more stories in-game. For better or for worse, though, Blizzard doesn’t let any of their franchises lie fallow forever, so sooner or later the StarCraft story is going to start moving forward again.

I have to wonder, though, where does it go from here? Both StarCraft games formed a pretty coherent story arc, all building to the conclusion in Legacy of the Void, and now that arc is finally over. For the first time, we’re in uncharted waters with no clear indication of where to go next.

Still, there are some possibilities. Obviously, there will be spoilers for the StarCraft story to date here.

Rogue elements:

Even if the main factions of each race — the Swarm, the Dominion, and the Daelaam — manage to stay on mostly friendly terms, there’s still the potential for rogue elements from within each race to cause trouble.

I definitely think this is the intended role of the Tal’darim. They’re a readily available bunch of nasty Protoss for the player to beat on, and they serve that role well.

Terran society, as well, offers plenty of opportunity for further conflict. It’s just human nature; we’re a fractious bunch. We’ve already seen that with the Defenders of Man in Covert Ops, and there’s also the potential for renewed conflict with the Kel-Morian Combine or even the Umojan Protectorate, though the latter is a bit of a stretch.

The Zerg are theoretically homogeneous, but there’s still the possibility of feral broods wandering the cosmos, mindlessly consuming all in their path, and there’s Dehaka and the Primals to consider. Their loyalty to the Swarm was always tenuous at best, and they have no code beyond the desire to feed and grow stronger.

This is the safest route. It won’t radically change the feel of the StarCraft universe, and it’s a logical evolution of the current story. It doesn’t lend itself well to the kind of epic story-telling we’re used to from Blizzard, though. The Tal’darim are scary, but they’ll never equal Amon.

Other aliens:

One of the interesting things about StarCraft is that it’s clearly established there are many intelligent races in the galaxy beyond the big three and the Xel’naga, but we just never see them. The only species beyond the majors even mentioned by name is the Kalathi, and we know next to nothing about them.

If Blizzard were to introduce new aliens into the StarCraft universe, it could be in the form of an entirely new playable faction in all areas of the game, or maybe just something that only appears in campaigns and/or other story-telling mediums (like novels).

I think my preference would be the latter. I loved it when Warcraft went from two playable factions to four, and the sheer ballsiness of adding new playable races would be exciting, but at this point the traditional StarCraft triad is so entrenched and iconic I’m not sure it should change.

But if they’re just a story-telling element, it could be interesting. There’s no limit to what Blizzard could come up with, so from that perspective the prospect of new aliens has the most potential of all the ways to continue StarCraft’s story.

Earth:

Then there’s the United Earth Directorate to consider. Their last attempt to conquer the Koprulu Sector ended very badly, but there’s no guarantee they won’t try again.

For my part, though, I rather like that Earth is some distant, unknown thing in the StarCraft universe, and I’m not sure I’d want to jeopardize that.

Actually, I would like to see what Earth is like in the StarCraft universe, but I’d like to see it in some spin-off that’s unrelated to events in the Koprulu Sector. Let the two realms stay separate.

Amon’s legacy:

Legacy of the Void wrapped up the main story very well, but one thing it did leave a bit unanswered is what became of Amon’s armies after his defeat.

Of course, the simple answer is that they were destroyed, and I’m sure that’s true… but were they totally wiped out?

Moebius Corps and the feral Zerg broods were just mindless tools, so I don’t imagine they’re still kicking… but what of the Hybrids? Was every last one of them eliminated?

And what of the Tal’darim? Surely some must have remained loyal to Amon in their hearts, even if they dared not speak out against Alarak openly.

Amon is gone for good, but the horrors he unleashed may not be so easily caged.

Continuing with Amon’s legacy is of course the most predictable route, and it risks simply rehashing Legacy of the Void… but tell me the thought of a lone Hybrid lurking in the dark places of the universe and plotting its vengeance doesn’t give you chills just a little bit.

The WoW route:

Everyone just starts fighting again because reasons.

Not a great option, but it wouldn’t be quite as illogical as the transition between Warcraft III and World of Warcraft was, at least.

* * *

Those are the possibilities that immediately come to mind for me. It’s entirely possible there are some I over-looked. You could also combine elements of the above. Maybe a heretofore unknown alien race conquers Earth, and the survivors are forced to seek refuge with their cousins in the Koprulu Sector. Maybe a surviving Hybrid stumbles upon the Kalathi and uses their hatred of the Protoss to turn them into an army.

Do you have any theories for where StarCraft can go from here?

Still cool, though.

Recently I commissioned the very talented Mel Addams, whom I met on The Secret World’s official forums, to do a sketch of the heroine from my World Spectrum novels, Leha, the Hero of Heart.

I gotta say, it turned out pretty well (click for full size):

I really like the claws.

This is actually the second sketch Mel has done for me; some years ago, they also did a sketch of some characters from one of my unpublished works, and it also turned out brilliantly.

I would definitely encourage everyone to check out Mel’s Tumblr to see more of their work (mostly TSW fan art), and if you have anything you’d like to see drawn, get in touch with them. They’re quite good, their prices are reasonable, and they’re a pretty friendly and pleasant person in general.

Trying something a little different today.

I’ve been tinkering with a video recording program (OBS for those keeping score at home), and I’ve decided to experiment with some video content for the blog.

For my first (and possibly only) video post, I decided to do a co-op mission in StarCraft II, playing as Vorazun. I also take the opportunity to ramble about my love for the Protoss and their lore, and discuss how my voice is the auditory equivalent of Martin Shkreli.

This is very much an experiment, so feedback is welcomed. It’s not something I’ve had a huge amount of interest in prior to now, but my father has suggested it a few times, and I was somewhat inspired by the video posts Ashley has been doing over at Robo♥beat.

What I’m saying is: This is all their fault. Send your hate mail to them, not me.

I’m sure at least one of my readers will be happy to see this.

While looking for new stuff to watch, I signed up for the free trial of another Netflix-like streaming service, CraveTV. Their selection isn’t vast, but they do have a few titles I’ve been meaning to check out, most notably the oft-recommended Killjoys.

Time for another series of binge-watch reviews. As usual, I may be a bit looser with spoilers than usual.

“Bangarang” (pilot episode):

My main problem with Killjoys right now is it feels like a story I’ve seen many times before. A group of misfit mercenaries go on rollicking adventures with lots of slick action sequences and sarcastic one-liners.

Specifically, it is the story of a woman calling herself Dutch and her partner, Johnny. They are what the locals call “Killjoys” — essentially bounty hunters — operating in a remote region of space known as the Quad. The pilot focuses on Johnny defying Dutch and risking the wrath of their handlers to rescue his brother, D’avin, who’s had a price put on his head.

Along the way, we get some hints of the characters’ various dark pasts, and the geopolitics surrounding the local oppressive regime, but not enough to really make much of an impression.

It’s not that it’s bad. The only thing that strongly bothered me about the pilot is its loud and obtrusive soundtrack.

It’s just generic. There’s very little to set Killjoys apart from the many and sundry other fictional works in this general vein, at least right now. There’s nothing about the premise, the world, the characters, or even the quality of its execution to set it apart from the pack.

Still, the special effects are good, the action sequences are fun enough, and I can think of worse ways to spend an hour, so I’ll stick with the show for now. Perhaps it will improve.

Overall rating: 6.9/10

“The Sugar Point Run”:

Usually the second episode of a series is pretty weak, but this one’s not bad.

Dutch and the team are sent to perform a prisoner exchange to rescue the daughter of a powerful Company official. To this end, they must venture into a post-apocalyptic former warzone riddled with scavengers, organ harvesters, and other colourful characters.

It pretty much goes without saying things don’t go according to plan.

There’s a lot of twists in this episode, but most of them are the sort of thing you can easily see coming. It does, however, have the effect of keeping the viewer engaged and keeping the story flowing along at a good pace. It’s entertaining.

The real purpose of the episode is to give D’avin a chance to prove his worth and to establish him as a real member of the team. It performs this task adequately, though I can’t say I’m finding him particularly compelling as a character right now.

All in all, “The Sugar Point Run” is a simple but enjoyable episode. My only real complaint is how they keep overlaying the action sequences with such obnoxious, distracting music.

Overall rating: 7/10

“The Harvest”:

The plot of this one is once again fairly simple — a friend of Johnny’s needs his help to track down her husband — but it does serve to help flesh out the cast a little bit.

My favourite part of “The Harvest” is actually a B plot involving D’avin trying to get a rubber stamp for his Killjoy psych evaluation from a doctor of somewhat loose morals named Pawter. It establishes D’avin as a real person with some vulnerability, as well as offering a glimpse of an interesting mystery surrounding his past, and Dr. Pawter seems like an interesting character, too. I hope to see more of her.

Meanwhile, Johnny’s sibling rivalry with D’avin, while predictable, also helps him feel a bit more like a real person, something all of the cast members have struggled with so far.

The mystery surrounding the missing husband turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, but I think fleshing out the characters makes “The Harvest” a worthwhile endeavour.

Boy am I starting to hate the soundtrack on this show, though.

Overall rating: 7.2/10

“Vessel”:

The Killjoys’ latest mission is to protect the unborn heir to a noble house in order to prevent a civil war. To this end, they venture into a toxic badlands to make contact with an enclave of surprisingly well-armed priestesses.

The problem with this episode is there’s no emotional investment. The Killjoys universe is not developed enough yet for me to care about a civil war — and the risk of such never feels terribly immediate — and the story has no relevance to the main characters. In theory I suppose we’re intended to get invested in the priestesses, but I can’t say I particularly cared about them, either.

The end result is a story that’s theoretically functional but which is utterly bland.

Also, no way a woman is going to be up and walking and that composed mere moments after giving birth.

Overall rating: 5/10

“A Glitch in the System”:

Obligatory ghost ship episode inc.

However, while this is a premise I’ve seen done by basically every sci-fi show ever, it’s actually a pretty good episode. The creepy factor is strong, there’s a decent element of mystery, and it gets pretty intense by the end.

We also got some more revelations into D’avin’s history, which is the show’s most compelling story right now.

Conversely, the plot around Dutch’s past is failing to capture my interest right now. I think they revealed too much of it too quickly. My curiosity isn’t peaked; while there’s still clearly more to learn, I nonetheless feel I know all that I need to.

Still, this is probably the strongest episode so far. The music wasn’t even all that annoying.

Overall rating: 7.8/10

Moving on to the second half of my binge watch of the first season of Killjoys. Once again, there’s probably gonna be spoilers.

“One Blood”:

A legendary Killjoy has stolen something of incredible value to the Company, and the race is on for the other Killjoys to find him.

Dutch finds herself torn between conflicting loyalties. “The warrant is all,” but this particular Killjoy was a friend and mentor to her, and the other major figure from her past, Khlyen, has an interest in what was stolen.

“One Blood” is a pretty good episode overall. There’s more going on than usual in Killjoys, and there’s a nice intriguing mystery to it.

As far as character development goes, it’s a bit of mixed bag. I’m starting to get a bit more interested in Dutch and her dark past, and seeing the team unifying to help her at the end was a very nice moment, but the fact that they just handed over the terrible superweapon to the Company is kind of hard to swallow. I kept expecting them to “accidentally” destroy it, but apparently Dutch and her team are of much looser morals than I had given them credit for.

Also, yay for seeing Ian Tracey again, even if it’s a small role.

Overall rating: 7.5/10

“Kiss, Kiss, Bye Bye”:

This had the ingredients to be a very good episode, and in some ways it was, but there’s also a lot wrong with it.

The team finally succeeds in tracking down the doctor who scrambled D’avin’s brain (played by sci-fi legend Amanda Tapping, which is awesome) and learning the truth of why he murdered his squad, but the doctor is not without ways to keep her secrets safe.

This is a very intense episode, and I like that about it, but unfortunately most of the drama comes from the incompetence of the protagonists, and that kind of takes the edge out of it all. It’s painfully obvious Dr. Jaeger is up to know good, and yet they just leave her unsupervised for hours at a time. These are supposed to be elite agents?

On that note, also, I find it hard to believe that with all their fancy RAC toys, Dutch still didn’t have a better way to disarm D’avin than to shine a light in his eyes and hit him with a box.

Nor am I entirely pleased that Dutch and D’avin are now apparently an item. Gods save me from the endless tide of forced romantic subplots.

It’s also a little unfortunate that D’avin’s mysterious past has been wrapped up so quickly, as it was easily the most interesting part of the show up until now. I guess that’s one of the problems with Killjoys; it’s not quite an arc-based show, and it’s not purely episodic, either. It’s occupying some uncomfortable middle ground where each individual episode’s plot isn’t quite a satisfying package on its own, but there isn’t really a main plot thread flowing through it all to become invested in.

Johnny puts on a good performance, at least. He’s felt kind of faceless for most of the series to date, but he seems to be settling in as the lovable heart of the team, a Samwise sort of character. I can dig that.

Overall rating: 6.9/10

“Come the Rain”:

Johnny contrives to patch things up between Dutch and D’avin by sending them off a warrant that will force them to spend some time alone, but while they’re away, he finds himself caught in a hostage situation during a deadly acid rain storm.

I really could have done without the ongoing drama with Dutch and D’avin, but Johnny’s story is actually pretty good. The hostage situation itself is pretty by the numbers, but it’s an excuse for some great performances by Johnny and Dr. Pawter.

I gotta say, I enjoy learning more about Pawter. I like her character. Well, “like” maybe isn’t the right word, but she’s fascinating. Like a car wreck — you just can’t look away.

Johnny is also on the fast track to be my favourite character on this show. While this episode further establishes him as the heart of the team and someone who will always put others ahead of himself, he also has the opportunity to be pretty damn badass. A strong showing all around.

Overall rating: 7.8/10

“Enemy Khlyen”:

This is my favourite episode so far, but it’s still not without its hiccups.

Using a reverse-engineered neural link, Dutch is finally able to track down her twisted mentor Khlyen, and what she discovers is shocking: He’s a high-ranking RAC officer.

Breaking into the RAC is nigh-impossible task, but Dutch and the team are determined to finally get some answers, so the mission is on.

Khlyen working for the RAC — or perhaps, more frighteningly, the RAC working for him — is an excellent twist and by far the most interesting development in the show to date, and I’m also intrigued by the second mention of “Red 17,” whatever that is.

It’s also a plenty exciting episode. A pretty standard heist sort of scenario, but well done.

Also, normally I complain about the soundtrack on this show, and on principle I still dislike hearing loud contemporary music blaring in the middle of a far-future sci-fi… but for July Talk, I’ll make an exception. Definitely didn’t expect to hear one of the best Toronto rock bands in Killjoys, but I won’t complain.

However, “Enemy Khlyen” does suffer from a bit of what I like to call a Voyager ending, where all the tension just dissolves for an illogically hasty resolution in the final minutes. Seemed like both Dutch and Khlyen just kind of gave up and stopped trying for no apparent reason at the end.

Overall rating: 8/10 Earns bonus points for July Talk.

“Escape Velocity” (season finale):

To be honest, Killjoys mostly failed to impress me through its first season. It’s been good enough, but never more than that. In my mind, the word “mediocre” is closely associated with the series.

Credit where credit is due, though: This is a pretty damn good season finale.

Events in the Quad have reached a boiling point. The Scarback monks have been framed for a brutal terrorist attack, and the Qreshi nobles plot to end their Westerley problem once and for all. While Dutch and the team want to focus on Khlyen, they can’t help but be drawn into the rapidly escalating political situation.

This is the most intense episode yet, and I was really amazed by how dark things got in the end. I admire a story that can shock us out of our lethargy, and this certainly has (even if said lethargy was induced by the lackluster nature of Killjoys to date).

Once again, we see what a master manipulator Khlyen is, as he once again manages to get Dutch right where he wants her without her suspecting a thing. Johnny continues to surprise with his quick wits and big heart.

However, it’s still not quite perfect. Too much of the drama still hinges on the incompetence of the protagonists. D’avin pretty much walked straight into Khlyen’s arms, and the Qreshi coup couldn’t have happened if Dutch and the team hadn’t handed over the genetic bomb earlier in the season.

Also, these world-shaking events seemed to sort of come out of nowhere. I can’t say there wasn’t foreshadowing, because there has been, but things escalated very, very quickly and with little warning. I was still trying to get a handle on the fundamental geographic, cultural, and political layout of the Quad, and already the whole thing is tearing itself apart.

You know what Killjoys needs more of? Info-dumps. As writers we’re warned to avoid info-dumps, and yes, they can often be tedious and off-putting, but they’re also often necessary. One season in, I still have a lot of very fundamental questions about Killjoys and its setting that are unanswered.

When is this? What, if any, is the Quad’s relationship with the rest of the universe? Where’s Earth in all this? Why was the Quad settled? What is the Company and how did it come to control everything? I could just keep going.

Dark Matter did something similar, but its strong character focus carried the story, and by the time they got into big political events, they’d had plenty of time to flesh things out.

Still, “Escape Velocity” remains a very strong episode. In fact that’s a large part of why these questions are nettling me. The reason I haven’t brought them up before now is that up until “Escape Velocity” I simply didn’t care. Now I do.

Overall rating: 8.5/10

* * *

Thus concludes season one. Unfortunately that’s all Crave has right now, and I’m not impressed enough to buy downloads from Google Play or iTunes, so my reviews end here for now. The season finale was impressive enough that I would like to see more of the show at some point, though, so I’ll try to keep an eye out. I expect they’ll add season two sooner or later.