What can I say about 2024 that hasn’t already been howled at the moon in anger? It was okay. The gaming industry in particular continues to look bleaker by the moment, the worst people you’ll never meet continue to use AI to churn out the ugliest, most soulless slop you’ve ever seen, and some abject losers keep making lists of games they don’t want to play because there’s a gay person in it or whatever. Luckily there’s been a lot of good to drown it out. A few indie darlings caught my eye, as well as a couple of bigger releases I’ve been waiting for, one of which is indisputably my favorite in a “hear me out” kind of way.
I don’t want to dwell too much on what held me back last year, if you know me or follow me anywhere, you can probably pull a few examples. The rest of it, that’s between me and the god of unfinished projects. My main takeaway from 2024 is we have to keep making the art that speaks to our hearts, regardless of who’s barking about it. And in 2025 I intend to play and write about a lot more of what speaks to my heart. I intend to keep making my own art, cultivate my style and craft, purge the dredges of irony within me, walk along 2025 with intentionality and resilience, and maybe a little pizzazz.
6. Fields of Mistria
Fields of Mistria asks the question, “are you sick of Harvest-Moon-likes yet?” and uh, not really! Every simulacrum of my beloved farming sim holds true to the core features that made something like Harvest Moon enticing to begin with while also introducing new gimmicks to it, like you’re a farmer but also a witch, or there’s a combat aspect, or there’s a big secret down in the mines, or someone else is a witch but the bad kind, whatever. I’m waiting for the day that we get a truly grimdark farming sim because I know it’s out there, percolating in someone’s head.
Despite the fact that I will likely not crack open Fields of Mistria again just for my own peace of mind, I enjoyed the 20 or so hours of completionist-fueled anxiety I endured trying to get through the first year as swiftly and substantially as possible. It was fun, there are a lot of little details that make the repetitive nature of these types of games pleasant. It’s a great choice for those of you out there who can actually play farming sims normal style.
5. Helldivers 2
I’m putting aside the fact that I haven’t touched Helldivers 2 since October. It was always going to be one of those games that I would play so much of and then none at all. And I played so much Helldivers 2 in the first few months it came out. You can’t deny the grip it had on everyone, especially with how attentive and cheeky the developers were. For a co-op shooter, it’s incredibly immersive, from the beautiful and creepy landscapes to the sound design. I made no less than three distinct Helldivers playlists and none of them ever got used because it was more interesting to maintain that sense of vigilance and keep an ear out for distant automaton marching songs or whatever.
For a while, I had some friends to squad up with every other night, and I think what was most fascinating was watching how our group dynamics organically showed up in a game that is both about and not about teamwork at all. Like, going on little solo missions while your friends went to tackle a big bug nest or something, or emergency rescue missions, or those hectic endings where only one person makes it out, possibly due to the sacrifice of everyone else. It’s a good game for intense moments, like one time a friend of mine kited a bile titan near a hellbomb and I sniped it from a perch, and we blew it the fuck up. Or all the times we accidentally dropped into a zone that was way hotter than we expected and had to improvise in total chaos. Now I’m just giving you examples of fun moments in my own games, and that’s what Helldivers 2 is about.
4. Buckshot Roulette
I wrote some words about this game already but it can’t be understated how cool I think Buckshot Roulette is. Grimey, strange, exciting. I love a game that gives you a lot of little fucked up ways to go about something, a sandbox dedicated to not shooting yourself in the head. Just perfect.
3. World of Warcraft: The War Within
As Gamesline’s resident Warcraft freak, I have to say, you’d think it’d be getting pretty old by now. There have already been nine expansions in the span of 20 years, and The War Within is the first of three expansions in a sort of thematically-related trilogy of smaller expansions, the other two coming out uhhhhh eventually. Even as a scaled-down expansion, The War Within is super solid. I won’t go into most of the details because it’s like expecting someone else to be excited about my grocery list. I will say I used to kind of hate Chris Metzen but by the end of Shadowlands I felt a religious sort of relief at the announcement that he was returning. Part of it also had to do with throwing the sexual predators out of Blizzard, but we’re finally on an upswing. They can’t undo the damage to Sylvanas’ character, but we move on.
The War Within introduced new factions that have deep ties to the lore, including a cloistered group of light-worshipping people derived from an ancient partnership between early humans and the high elves that taught them magic, now homogeneously half-elves and stuck underground from an expedition gone mysteriously wrong. Personally, I find it very sweet. There are a lot of nods to the origins of their heritage, the total union of two races over so many years, not only in aesthetics but in culture. The greater kingdom they departed from has only ever been implied in lore, but here there’s the confirmation – they’re out there and just because we help their little lost expedition does not mean they won’t hate our guts if we ever meet. TBD. Their representative zone is also one of the most stunning places in the entire game. Fully underground (as most of the new zones are) but spacious and green, mysterious deep waters at the edge, and a huge crystal jutting in from the cavern ceiling that shifts between light and dark, bathing the whole area in lovely hues.
The previous expansion, Dragonflight, had a tone shift from the dumpster dive that was Shadowlands more toward a newfound sense of hope and unity, and The War Within carries on with this sentiment, despite the new cosmic-threat-level villain (who always has her feet out, unfortunately.) There’s emotional investment in the story, which is honing in on the now decade-long trauma build-up for a few key characters. All that to say, there’s a lot of open and raw vulnerability in the writing, like watching a longtime friend finally figure out how to talk about the feelings they’ve been bottling up forever. It’s a mature, cathartic angle from which to view these characters, so much so it thoroughly pissed off some of the “go woke go broke” people, which is always a sign that you’re headed in the right direction.
This is another one of those games that I always play a ton of when it first comes out and then I take longer and longer breaks between substantial content patches. I used to raid and stuff, back when I had more time, but nowadays this is more of a solo experience for me. The War Within introduced some quality of life changes and new mechanics, and established enough big story beats that I’m optimistic about the future of WoW. The next expansion, Midnight, promises to rebuild Silvermoon and unite the dispersed high elven offshoots all over Azeroth, of which there are now several. And seeing as how I’m one of those art deco elf-loving type of gays, that’s basically the best news I’ve heard in ten years. It’s always interesting, having the experience of playing this game more or less since 2004 and the historical context of all that past content, watching the ebb and flow of development, the significant changes and the faithful remnants of every expansion.
One of these days I’m going to write a hundred-page manifesto about all of my experiences and thoughts about these past 20 years of World of Warcraft and then move out into the woods or something.
2. Mouthwashing
This is another one I already wrote quite a bit about, so much so I’m not sure I have much else to say! I’m taking it in stride, the encroaching idea of a world that some people want so badly, devoid of art like this, invasive and graceful in its message, unapologetically gross and emotionally nuanced, you get it. I’m still surprised at how much was conveyed with so little time, even for someone like me who likes to run around aimlessly. I went into Mouthwashing mostly blind and the shadow between what I expected and what I felt after finishing it stretched on for miles. One of the best things to come out of 2024.
1. Dragon Age: The Veilguard
The thing about Veilguard is it made me feel so crazy. Every conceivable element to a Dragon Age game, to a Bioware game, that existed within Veilguard – which is to say, hopefully all of them – was done to a half-measure. And if my main gripe about a game is that I wished there was more of it, or that I wish it had been fleshed-out properly, there’s still something to examine there within my feelings about it. The combat was halfway decent, the story was halfway decent, the companions were halfway decent, the romance was halfway decent, the worldbuilding was halfway decent, the dialogue was halfway decent, across the board the game was satisfyingly average, with some personal high points.
I liked the narrative of Veilguard well enough. The balance between the looming overarching threat presented on the bigger scale of Thedas and the major areas within it versus the more intimate scale of your personal beef with Solas (and the existential need for justice and closure, I suppose) is balanced well, coupled with the fact that Rook is a welcome departure from a typical clueless protagonist, the stakes are pretty clearly defined and it’s easy to feel invested in the whole thing. There are some well-aimed stabs at certain themes that have run through the Dragon Age franchise as a whole, like bodily autonomy, inevitable sacrifice and loss, guilt that can torment a person and the desire for vengeance that can often go along with it.
The dialogue itself is, at times, kind of meandering in a way that doesn’t contribute anything substantial to the story, just pure flavor text, especially between companions. At least in other Dragon Age games, companion banter carried a lot of weight in terms of developing companion personality and dynamics, but Veilguard banter is oftentimes forgettable. It’s not nearly as bad and Whedon-y as I thought it was going to be based off the trailer, but it’s, again, halfway decent. The bright spots were the conversations with Solas in the Fade prison and his piece of the narrative toward the end of the game, as there was depth and intentional rhetorical design in his dialogue that was evocative of what made his character interesting in Inquisition. The big twist did get my ass, I have to give it to them for that.
I don’t want to say too much in case I realize my urge to write a whole piece about it, but I’m currently playing through the first three Dragon Age games to really nail down how I feel about Veilguard as a Dragon Age game regardless of how I feel about it as a game in and of itself, which is complicated. I wish aggro existed in Veilguard, because as a mage I spent 90% of my time dodge-rolling and 10% of my time casting spells. One of the mage specializations is designed to be up close and personal, and at least it’s fun, and the frantic button mashing had a charm to it, especially whenever anyone else was watching me play. Most of the armor is some of the ugliest I’ve ever seen in my life, but that may be just a personal preference. The Qunari redesign isn’t as grating as I thought it would be, I think it feels bad because the art style is more soft. Less forgivable is the continued erasure of the flat elf nose bridge, one of many little details they perfected in Dragon Age 2 and then dunked into the toilet. The environments are usually gorgeous and dense, but Arlathan Forest is so visually demanding that I have to do graphics setting alchemy just to run around at more than 10 frames per second and still be blinded by the unbelievable amount of bloom. The romance path I chose was totally endearing, but so lacking compared to what we’ve come to expect with Bioware games. One of the endings doesn’t make sense, but one of them made me cry. Also, why is the Inquisitor wearing Rook’s default casual outfit when you meet them in Minrathous? What ever happened with the mage and templar conflict? And why do all my companions like each other? The other day, I rediscovered a clip of Alistair telling Morrigan to “crawl into a bush somewhere and die” and honestly I wanted some of that energy. Every minor disagreement is resolved almost instantly by Rook’s consistent gentle parenting. Yet, some of the subsequent conversations are touching, raw, vulnerable, all that shit that I like. The dynamic between the companions and Rook feel exclusive from each other and developed properly despite that sheen of consistent positivity. In a world where I’m not allowed to truly piss anyone off, I suppose this is a tolerable compromise.
Overall, the tone shift takes some getting used to. It’s much less dark fantasy compared to Origins and 2, but Inquisition started to lean away from that anyway, stylistically at least. The Blight was specifically preserved as horrifying and gross, thankfully, but Veilguard suffers from that lack of grim aesthetic in other places.
Arguing about completeness feels moot when someone starts dragging the concept art into it, but damn they left a lot of ideas on the floor, it seems. It also makes me wonder more about the process, who exactly at EA or Bioware or on the Dragon Age team hates Dragon Age in these really specific ways that resulted in the unique mess that was Veilguard. The fact that it started as a live-service game and had to revert, shipped as polished as it did, and was still enjoyable is surprising. The bones of that live-service format are still here and there, but definitely not as intrusive as I was expecting. Between that unrealistic premise, the layoffs and transfers, it’s remarkably unfair that EA seems hellbent on killing a franchise that has a lot of history and a lot of love, instead of letting the people who’ve carried it this far just go crazy and make the game they know is going to sell, and not have to take a decade to do it. I can’t wait to see what finally kills Mass Effect.
Despite all that and maybe in part due to the absolutely turbulent year I had, Veilguard was comforting and fun. It was something I thought about a lot after I finished my first playthrough, became thoroughly invested in my own Rook as a character, and felt that weight that comes with any sequel of a franchise you’ve been following for like 15 years. Overall, despite my complaints, Veilguard ended up giving me those warm, fuzzy Dragon Age vibes I was looking forward to. I yearn so much in my heart for more Dragon Age, and it’s a shame that Veilguard is likely the last one we’re going to get, so whatever, it’s my favorite game of the year.
