your year in gaming 2023

Gaming was a big decompressor for me this year, and I played a lot of really good shite for the first time while revisiting some favorites.

Started the year with Dishonored 2 (played DH1 at the end of last year) and then Kena: Bridge of Spirits, which was one of my surprise games for the year. Next, blew through Hogwarts Legacy which, in spite of all of its flaws, and they are legion, I enjoyed more than I thought I would. The next few months were taken up by (yet another) Mass Effect LE trilogy run, but this time somewhat heavily modded, so that was a lot of fun. Jedi Survivor next, which I very much enjoyed, but the performance issues were frustrating. Next was my first foray into Dark Souls, playing Remastered, 2 SotFS, and 3 one after the other over a three month period. Then I picked up BG3, which I've enjoyed more than I thought I would. About halfway through the second act before taking a break and going back to do several complete DkS1 runs and about to complete a second DkS3 run. Then likely back to BG3, but we'll see.

But overall, genuinely a hell of a gaming year for me.

my 2 biggest surprises:

1) Baldur's Gate 3

I had no desire to play it due to turn-based, but gave it a shot with my wife (who doesn't play video games at all) doing split screen co-op on the PS5 and we've had a blast the last couple of months. Just killed Raphael and have all of the netherstones so I think we mostly just have the brain stuff left. We are already planning to try Divinity Original Sin 2 assuming it's on PS5 (I think it is?)

2) Zelda Skyward Sword

I never played it on Wii. I bought it on Switch when the HD version originally came out but stopped playing after an hour or two. Decided to give it another shot and forced myself to at least play through the first real dungeon and have been mostly hooked. Just had to get used to the controls (holding L to use the camera and using the right stick to control the sword, for instance). I still have some issues here and there with controls and using items/gear but I've loved the dungeons and puzzle solving. I'm in the middle of the 2nd flame stuff so I should be getting close to the end.

2023 was an amazing year for gaming. Started off real strong for me with the Dead Space remake. I was a little late to the game, but ended up getting Elden Ring and loved it. Then picked up Jedi: Survivor and had a blast with it. So much improved on the previous title. After that, i finally got around to playing Days Gone and opine it might be the most underrated game to come out on PS4. Baldur’s Gate 3 was such a pleasant surprise. It’s the type of game that Bioware wishes they could make Dragon Age into. So refreshing to see a studio actually care about the end product and continually listen to the community, providing massive updates regularly. Only game I wanted but havent been able to pick up yet is Lies of P. Figured it would be worth it since I liked Sekiro so much and it seems to be pretty similar.

my 2023 gaming

elden ring - Spectacular
Frostpunk - Fun, fairly easy though once you learn certain mechanics
Stellaris - Had fun with it, but hard to recommend. didnt like the combat much, didnt feel like learning what every ship did.
metro 2033 - a classic
NieR: Automata - Pretty fun. I didnt go through multiple endings though.
Baldurs Gate 3 - Played for about 40 hours. Didnt really stick with me. not my style
cyberpunk 2077 - Spectacular. Grinded too much and became OP. Story missions became boring. too much dialog. Still would recommend
Civilization 6 - in the midst of a current binge. Fun for sure, very time consuming.

Best game I played: Ghost of Tsushima. This is a masterpiece. Visually stunning, super fun and satisfying combat, the most seamless wayfinding system I have ever seen, and it really had a lot of flexibility and room for creativity in your play style and how you completed missions. This is everything an open world RPG should be. I could nitpick some things, but overall an incredible game.

Biggest disappointment: Hogwarts Legacy. This is not a bad game. It has a fun combat system, a beautiful world to explore, a solid enough story, etc, but something is missing. I find the game very grindy and repetitive. I gave up on it after about 15 hours because it just wasn’t feeling “fun” despite it seemingly having everything that should be fun in it. This is still a good game, just couldn’t live up to expectations.

Biggest surprise: CD Projeckt Red released an update for the Witcher3 that nerfed the healing skill bonus when consuming food. While this was arguably balancing out a somewhat broken mechanic, I had grown used to it being the other way. If the game had used the post-patch version from the jump, this would have been fine, but I had already done multiple playthroughs with it the way it was.

I didn’t want the change nor did I like it. The huge difference in healing basically resulted in a massive difficulty increase to players playing on medium to low difficulty. That’s not where I want to experience massive difficulty jumps. I liked Witcher 3, in part, because it had a difficulty slider I could adjust at any time. If I got bored, I could slide it up to get challenged a little. If I got stuck, I could adjust it down so I could get past the part I’m stuck on without having to waste tens of hours backtracking, mindlessly grinding, or loading a previous save and losing hours of progress. NOTHING makes me drop a game faster than getting stuck on a boss I can’t beat or a room I can’t get out of forcing me to load a previous save and lose hours of progress. If a game has a bad difficulty/progress curve and expects me to grind mindlessly (not through fun sidequests, but random encounters) for hours just to level up and “get gud” enough to continue progressing through the story, I’mma quit. The game advancing in difficulty as you become more capable is a critical balancing act of any game.

I play on easy or medium because I don’t want to struggle too much. I just want to escape to a pretty world and have fun in the story role playing a character. I want to feel like in a bigger than average fight like I might lose, but rarely do without completely f$&king myself up. This MASSIVE spike in difficulty literally made me rage quit a game that I had sunk over 100 hours into, and I haven’t played it since. F$&k you, I wish I knew how to uninstall that update from my ps4 because it broke my enjoyment of literally one of my 3 favorite games for the PS4.

Looking back, and realizing that the only 2023 releases I played are FF16 and Octopath Traveler 2. I may be too picky.

I really liked FF16 but it was a bit too ambitious and I strongly disliked the ending. I would say I was disappointed, but it's more of a mixed bag. It definitely could have been better in ways. But the normal combat was good and if you took the time to do all the side quests, the world immersion was really good. The boss fights against Titan and Ultima, in particular, were quite punishing yet rewarding.

OT2, however, blew my mind. Playing a "modernized" but still old school pixelated feeling JRPG with 8 separate and unique stories tied together by incredibly challenging endgame content to top it off, was a breath of fresh air in a gaming industry that's tripping all over itself trying to constantly reinvent the wheel. I haven't had as much fun playing a game since Skyrim and Witcher 3. If any of you old school JRPG fans haven't played it, you seriously don't know what you're missing.

Rest of the year I spent playing/replaying ACNH, Skyrim, Dragon's Dogma and CotW The Angler. Briefly played Graveyard Keeper, but couldn't learn all the intricacies of the system fast enough to enjoy it, so abandoned it pretty quickly.

My year in review says i played 46 games with destiny 2, hogwarts, daiblo iv and mlb the show 23 being my most played games.

Heavy play time Feb-june

Basically none at all July-Nov. I logged only 18 hours of gameplay in total during those months.