The Queue: personal attacks

I don’t usually ask for Queue questions, because every time I do, though of course my perspective is valued on certain topics, I end up feeling slightly personally attacked. Maybe that’s a consequence of being known — especially by my Steam wishlist.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us very specific, leading questions, and we answer and then talk to our therapist about it.

Cubone, because I like making myself sad.

In addition to all the freebies from the Epic Games Store daily giveaway over the holiday, I grabbed a lot of games during the Steam Winter Sale.

• DAVE THE DIVER
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
• No Case Should Remain Unsolved
• DREDGE
• Overland
• Atomicrops
• Tactical Breach Wizards
• Floodland
• Sons Of The Forest
• Amnesia: The Bunker

And yes, I re-purchased Dredge even though it was a giveaway on Epic because if I bundled it with Dave the Diver it was actually cheaper than buying Dave alone.

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that I haven’t started in on a lot of these just yet. I intentionally shelved Lorelei because I knew I wanted to full-in focus on it when I played it, and the year-end rollover is just a lot. In fact, over the holiday the game I probably played the most was Balatro, because I knew I was going to be really busy, so I ponied up for the mobile version in addition to the Steam version. Before that, I’d been playing a lot of Icarus, but since that doesn’t have a pause function I haven’t picked that back up since before school break started. Sons of the Forest scratched that survival game itch a bit, but as per usual, the push-pull between discovery and just tell me how to build a gosh darned house please takes a good amount of patience and my reserves are tapped.

I think the most enjoyable I’ve played of this particular group is a tie between Dredge and Dave the Diver. Dredge is creepy in my favorite ways, while simultaneously being weirdly chill and fun. Dave is weird because it feels very cozy and satisfying in some ways — the checkpoints for failure tend to be forgiving — but it’s a ton of different games in a trenchcoat, so you can’t really follow a particular gameplay loop for too long. It does make for an excellent game in this particularly distractible period, but also if I just wanna vibe and catch fish instead of managing my restaurant and growing vegetables and seahorse racing and also Balatro is in there too somehow (no, really), it’s just kinda jumping from one thing to another.

Wow. Just, wow. How dare you.

On the one hand, I do think it makes sense thematically to have a Hunter spec which is focused around being a true Archer or more generally a physical but distance damage dealer. The Archer archetype is core to any kind of action-based fiction set prior to the industrial revolution, and then the gun-based Artificer takes over. It’s kind of weird that this is the only class that features ranged weaponry at all (do Outlaw Rogues still have a single sidearm attack option that doesn’t actually use a piece of gear). I would think there would be narrative space in multiple classes for something like that — Assassination Rogues, for instance, should absolutely be able to snipe a target from afar. Expanding on the concept of Melf’s Acid Arrow and Mage-style archery, too, using a held weapon as a baseline stat stick would make sense.

But from a gameplay perspective, as someone who mostly solos, I hate it. I play a Hunter because I categorically don’t like playing melee characters, so I was already down to a choice between two specs. Marks as it stands now isn’t cannon-y enough to be a glass cannon, and also doesn’t have the options for slows and kiting that a spec like Frost Mages have, nor regenerative healing or mitigation. In some ways it does still make sense, because you have BM as the “solo spec” and Marks as the “group content spec,” in the same way that, say, Arcane Mages are intended for big damage in group settings. And it’s unquestionably less of a headache to balance a spec if you take away something that’s as huge a variable as a pet.

But it just kinda feels like, because the narrative idea of a Hunter is so broad, in trying to fit all those archtypes the gameplay options available are necessarily limited by trying to ram a few different narrative hooks into too tiny a box for it.