Fretting about what games to play!

I have an odd problem, though probably not so unusual these days when people have Steam libraries that number in the hundreds of games as well as consoles full of PS+ and Games with Gold “freebies”: I can’t find a game that I want to play.

I’m still playing Destiny more than is healthy, and I sometimes dip into LOTRO and Star Trek Online, all of which I enjoy, but I feel like I want something different. I don’t think I want another MMORPG, and if I did, I have Guild Wars 2, but never got into it. No, what I really want is a space game.

Some of this came about because Elite: Dangerous became available on Steam, so that got me thinking about the genre. I love the X games from Egosoft, from X2 through the various incarnations of X3. I bought X: Rebirth some time ago, but just couldn’t get into it. I started it again last week, since many patches and expansions have claimed to have “fixed” and improved the game. As far as I can tell, nope. X: Rebirth’s universe seems at once more crowded, yet more tedious than those of the other X games. Travel is done via space highways, which seems restrictive compared to the time-accelerating travel mechanism in the other games. I presume they want to make the universe more connected and continuous than before, but so far, I have the opposite impression. And since stations are now massive conglomerations of modules, you have to hunt for places to dock rather than just approaching the station and asking to dock. Even after I’ve visited a station, finding the docking areas is still a huge pain. Maybe it gets better when I add more gear to the ship, but so far, the game remains almost unplayable.

So looking through my enormous Steam library, I saw that I had bought Galaxy on Fire 2 HD when it was on sale some time ago. I also have it on my iPad, but the controls were pretty bad, so I hoped the controls and graphics would be better on my PC. Well sort of, but it is still a tedious and not fun game. It is basically a space dogfighter with little to no aim assist, with a little bit of trading and mining thrown in. In essence, not much fun. And, frankly, that’s what I’m worried Elite: Dangerous will be like. I would hate to spend $60 for a game that is by all  accounts half baked and have it not be much fun either. The reviews are suggesting that I’d like it, but who knows?

So for a change of pace, I figured I’d try Baldur’s Gate 2 EE that I also bought on sale on Steam. I never played BG2, but I loved Neverwinter Nights, so I figured it would be good. Well, no, I don’t have time to manage the spells and attacks for a whole party through a tedious interface. In Dragon Age Origins, your party members act appropriately for the role you assigned, but in BG2, they seem pretty useless unless you micromanage them. Well, since computers are better at tedious micromanaging than I am, I think the computer should have done more.

So I will not be continuing with BG2 or GoF2 since they are bad at letting the computer do things it should be doing. I may end up giving X: Rebirth another shot, but I don’t think I can justify $60 for Elite: Dangerous when I could hate it.

Oh well, Destiny is calling, as always.