To be clear, you do need to spend the ten levels (30-40) in NYC and complete the story there to advance the story for the seasonal content, etc. What happens in NYC is integral to the plot as a whole. You just don’t need to go back once you complete that part and the new stuff added since Warlords of New York doesn’t expand on NYC much.
Option B is to just never go to NYC but you lock yourself at level 30 that way and that’s the end of the content since all the new stories assume you’ve advanced the plot in NYC.
I tried the Diablo 4 beta. It was ok but it being an open-world MMO was a major turn off to the style of gameplay I normally expect from a Diablo game. I don’t see me getting it.
“Instanced” means that when you load into an area, you (and possibly your group) get a separate version of that area (an “instance”) where you are the only player(s).
For example, in an MMO, you may have public areas (towns, wilderness areas with wandering monsters, etc) where you can see other players, potentially dozens or hundreds of them. But when you pick up a quest and step into a dungeon, you and your party load into a separate version of the dungeon than anyone else playing the game.
The dungeon may be (and typically is) identical every time and for every group.
Fair enough. I saw your comment that the devs were focusing on NYC content and thought you were expecting to be stuck in NYC forever. That’s not the case and the focus for the past couple of seasons has been all on DC, but it’s a moot point if you don’t want to go into NYC at all.
The first 30 levels are still fun though, even if you want to cap the story with that.
Well I thought about continuing my new agent and just staying in DC, but decided against it. Too much other good stuff available to play to go through a new playthrough again.
So I looked at my other agents.
One is Level 40 and was still in NY. So I checked in, and they have the Wall Street mission (and therefore Liberty Island) not completed.
Another is also Level 40, and only has Liberty Island left to complete. I don’t recall for certain, I’m pretty sure I’ve attempted that mission with that agent at least once.
So I have 2 Level 40 agents at my disposal who are basically done with NY besides the two most pain in the ass missions. I really have no desire to do Liberty Island or fight Keener again. Every time I do it’s an hour(s?)-long ordeal and I’ve basically come to hate it. Nor, for that matter, do I desire to do Wall Street again.
The last agent I know has completed NY and I last left her in the White House, she’s my most experienced one. Also the only one I’ve beaten Keener with (3x, as I recall).
I just loaded that game up and it looks interesting again. I forgot how much stuff goes on on the map in this stage of the game.
I’ll be picking up that agent where we left off. I did do a chicken move and slide the global difficulty back down to “Normal” from “Challenging”. “Challenging” was fun when I was really honed in, but I need at least a couple sessions to awaken the old skills and remember what I’m doing.
Update: They’ve just added a bunch of new content, and they’ve put it on sale for $14.99, and they’ve said that in two weeks they’re going to bump the price up to a full-release price of $29.99. So now is probably the best chance to get it for the next couple of years.
Just finished The Evil Within on game pass. Pretty decent horror survival game/story. The controls and camera are a bit jank though. Even with sensitivity all the way up it would still take a loooong time to turn the camera around which really sucks when you’ve got some creepy boogen chasing you. I got through it in 24 hours, so it’s not very long. It has a “,new game+” feature that unlocks after you finish it so you can play it again with new feature or a harder difficulty. I liked it and all, but I don’t see myself replaying.
The greatest game of all time and I wrote plenty about it over on the thread dedicated to it. Took 145 hours and I did not do everything. Absolute perfection, my favorite game of all time.
Viewfinder
Neat puzzle game, but boring story and voice acting. If it had voices and story like Portal, it would have been better. Grew tiresome to play.
Assassin’s Creed Origins
I’ve owned a free copy of this for a long time and decided to load it up. Yeah, it was OK, but very repetitive and went on WAY too long. I heard Valhalla was even worse for going on forever and having you do similar things. By the end of Origins, I kept saying, “We get it! Get on with it! Let’s wrap it up!”
It did not seem well optimized for PC. I have a gaming PC that can run Elden Ring flawlessly and Origins, a game from 2017, had tons of pop-in. It ran well enough that I didn’t care, but I though the graphics would blow me away more. It looked OK.
Another open world that ended up being mostly dull.
I’ve played Assassin’s Creed 1, 2, part of 3, and part of 4. I heard they got even better at some point, but Origins was a decent, but not great game. I won’t likely return to the series unless I hear huge improvement have happened.