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Helldiving For Fun and Profit

Over the ridiculous number of years since I first started this blog I’ve developed the unfortunate habit of writing very terse impressions, if any at all, of the online games I play. This is especially regrettable given how much time I often sink into them. That’s part of the problem though – when you’re playing an MMO, a live service game, or just an online game you’re particularly hooked on, when is the right time to jump off the treadmill and write something up about it? In the early days of this blog the intent was actually to write about my online sessions themselves rather than focusing on final thoughts about a game, but with so many things competing for my free time combined with the effort it often takes to try to write something up, that quickly fell by the wayside. As such, other than briefly mentioning that it was in fact my 2024 game of the year, I somehow still haven’t talked about Helldivers 2 yet…

“Getting rushed by bugs immediately upon respawn. Yikes!”

I first heard about the original Helldivers and how much chaotic fun it could be around the time it launched back in 2015. I was definitely intrigued, but I never actually got around to trying it out. Fast forward to 2024, and owing largely to not really being in the PlayStation ecosystem at the time, the sequel was barely on my radar. I’d read the random skeptical comment about whether Arrowhead had the chops for such an ambitious sequel, but that was about it. Shortly after it launched, however, I stumbled upon a video or two that made the game look utterly amazing and it didn’t take much more before my interest was abosolutely piqued. The one problem I had was that this game is, like its predecessor, very co-op focused, and I’ve made the mistake of buying into co-op heavy games without a dedicated friend group to play with more than once in the past, and felt like that was a lesson… eh, mostly learned. Not wanting to admit defeat, I threw some feelers out to a few different friend groups, but as I’d predicted, no one bit. Then, quite randomly, one of my co-workers (who I’d actually never gamed with before) told me he’d just bought it and was loving it so far, and asked if any of us might be interested in playing it with him sometime. I picked it up that very evening.

Let me take a step back and give a quick overview of the game for the uninitiated. Helldivers 2 is a sci-fi online cooperative PvE third person shooter with persistent character progression, and is not unlike something like Vermintide and Darktide or Deep Rock Galactic, a genre which itself seems to have had its roots in the awesome Left 4 Dead series. Thematically, it barrows heavily from the 1997 Starship Troopers movie, but more on that later. The basic premise is that you and your squad are super expendable soldiers dispatched onto alien worlds to perform a variety of nearly suicidal missions on a large, open map, before waiting to be extracted in what can often be a tense final stand. The action is visceral, with huge hordes of enemies, massive explosions, and purposely higher than normal odds of killing yourself and/or your own squadmates in what are often hilarious moments of insane chaos. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much it in a nutshell!

“Picking my next mission aboard my destroyer.”

As soon as you launch the game you’re met with an intro movie that pitch-perfectly sets the tone, casting the player as a volunteer for Super Earth’s elite “peacekeeping force”, the Helldivers, whose job it is to spread “managed democracy.” The on-the-nose darkly humorous satire poking fun at western patriotism is, again, more than a little reminiscent of Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. You’re then thrown into a tutorial where you learn the basic controls and the humorous worldbuilding doesn’t let up. You’re next tasked with christening your destroyer (the ship that serves as each Helldiver’s personal between mission hub) by combining some pre-selected words to come up with your own ridiculous but lore appropriate name (mine is “SES Distributor of Truth”.) By the time you’re on your destroyer and ready to go on your first real mission, you’re already totally indoctrinated in the lore, or at least in the spirit of it. This is a great thing for a co-op game as, like Deep Rock Galactic’s legions of drunkard “Rock and Stone!” shouting space dwarves, most of the player base is aligned with a sense of casual roleplay that adds to the fun and a real sense of community. It’s so effective that Arrowhead probably doesn’t even need to employ the guy who, acting as something of a Dungeon/Game Master, handcrafts elements of the overarching campaign… but please keep him!

After spending a little while exploring my destroyer and the various options in the UI, I was already very impressed with the presentation. Everything felt well-polished and slick, even if I didn’t know exactly what a lot of what I was seeing actually was.

“The squad assessing a Terminid nest from afar. Real far.”

With my work friend not yet online, I decided to hop into a “quickplay” game with randos. My random squad of hapless FNGs landed in a tight ravine under the cover of a fairly dark night and almost immediately began getting swarmed by Terminids, one of Helldivers 2’s enemy factions who are extremely reminiscent of the “bugs” from, once again, the Starship Troopers movie. I had no real clue what I was doing, so I just quietly followed everyone else’s lead, and it was pure fucking chaos. Assault rifle fire lighting up the area, gore and body parts flying, grenades exploding, people dying. Holy shit! At some point I picked up a large machine gun support weapon dropped by one of my comrades who had traded it for something else they found and quickly started to have a lot of fun by hanging back and playing fire support, diving into prone and laying down a hail of bullets with each encounter. After that mission, I figured out how to customize my loadout so I could start bringing my own machine gun with me, and the rest of my afternoon practically disappeared. Now absolutely jonesing for more, I jumped on again for another session that evening, and this time hooked up with my friend. Playing with voice comms and something more closely resembling teamwork only served to add another layer of fun to the game, even if we did have to either play as a duo or rely on randoms to fill out our squad’s third and fourth slots. I was absolutely hooked.

So back to the mechanics, the basic structure of a mission looks something like this: On your destroyer, you head to the mission table and pick a sector, a planet within that sector, and a mission or set of missions on that planet. There’s a number of procedurally generated planets with different biomes, minor hazards, and weather conditions. Mission types depend on the difficulty you select and the enemy you’re facing, which include the aforementioned bug-like Terminids, the Terminator-like robotic Automatons, and the newly introduced very sci-fi, zombie-creating Illuminate. There’s a fair variety of mission objectives, such as destroying enemy facilities, killing specific high value enemy-types, retrieving and/or activating something, but they all ultimately play out relatively similarly. As an aside, I’ve always found it amusing just how so many of these missions, especially the secondary objectives, feel like extremely simple grunt work that SEAF (Super Earth Armed Forces) probably simply needed “a pair of hands” and “boots on the ground” to perform. “Sure, send us on a literal suicide mission simply to go turn a few leavers and press a few buttons to get an otherwise automated mineral extraction site going again? Why not?!” I guess that’s just SOP for the Helldivers, though.

“Hellpods shooting down to a planet’s surface.”

Anyway, you jump into your “Hellpod” and select your loadout of stratagems and a booster, and once the whole team is ready, your Hellpods launch like artillery shells out of a massive cannon onto the planet’s surface. From there, your team has to plot your course from wherever you picked to land to each of your objectives. Typically there’s a fairly easy pattern you can employ, such as a simple clockwise or anti-clockwise loop from one objective to the next, and finally to the exfiltration point. Along the way, you’ll come across secondary objectives, enemy outposts, and points of interest which can sometimes include supplies, support weapons, samples, medals, and even super credits. More on all those later. Of course, those points of interest are often teaming with enemies, and you’ll also have to contend with patrols and even enemies calling in more enemies, leading to sometimes needing to fend off multiple waves of them. Once your main objectives are complete, or if you run out of time, you make your way to the exfiltration point and call down the shuttle, which takes an uneasy 90 seconds or so as your enemies make one last assault, again, usually consisting of several intense waves.

Of course, that’s all incredibly reductive. I didn’t mention how you need to call down special support weapons and equipment (including vehicles) based on the “stratagems” you picked at the beginning of the mission by throwing a beacon down at where you want them to land, or how stratagems have a time between re-use and with all of the Eagle-1 assault ship based stratagems, a number of re-uses between when the Eagle has to return to your destroyer for a lengthier re-arm. I didn’t mention how every stratagem and pretty much every other in-game interactive object requires a QTE-like pattern of quick key/button presses which have to be executed properly. These aren’t difficult, but executing under extreme stress, which is often the case, can lead to a minor fumble with major consequences. I didn’t mention how dying works – that is, if you die, your team mates have to use a reinforcement stratagem they throw down to call you back in, and you have a limited reinforcement budget. You also have the ability to similarly request a resupply so that you and your team can restock on ammunition, grenades, and the all-important healing stims.

“Time for a little Dance Dance Revolution!”

And I didn’t really mention the stratagems themselves. In addition to being able to request a larger support weapon, there are things like defensive drones, shields, and distributable supply packs, and more stationary defenses like sentry drones of various types, minefields, and manable turrets. More importantly, you have one of the standout features of the game in the form of often impressively devastating strikes coming from both orbital attacks launched from your destroyer and airstrikes delivered by the aforementioned Eagle-1. There’s a large variety of these, from attacks meant to devastate a wide area of light targets, such as the Eagle Napalm Airtrike, to those made to hit a single heavily armored target with pin-point accuracy, like the Orbital Railcannon Strike. The moments when a huge strike hits exemplify Helldiver 2’s immersive, often very cinematic graphics, filled with impressive looking explosions, destructible buildings and terrain, and intense particle and lighting effects. Of course, they can also exemplify the game’s reputation for intentionally embracing hilarious accidental “friendly fire” team killing incidents as well. There have been a small handful of other games, such as Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, which had similar air strike mechanics, and it has never not been fun mechanic to me.

In the end, this all comes together to feel like a weird blend of something like a cooperative, PvE version of a Battlefield game (though Planetside 2 might be a closer comparison.) That is to say, a lightly tactical shooter mixed with an array of interesting tools and a huge open-world battlefields which both give players a lot of freedom with when and how to complete objectives and engage in combat, and leads to some amazing emergent moments.

“The glorious aftermath of an perfectly executed orbital strike.”

Back on your destroyer, you’re shown your mission statistics, the experience points and other rewards you got from the mission, and a rating. Rewards come in several forms. Of course, you gain experience points to level up your Helldiver, though leveling up really only affects some gating around certain stratagems and not much else. There are also Requisition Slips, which are the main currency you’ll be using to purchase new stratagems and ship upgrades, and are awarded fairly generously alongside XP. The ship upgrades also require a much rarer currency, samples. Samples are picked up around the map in missions and have to be carried to the end of the mission and successfully extracted with to earn, which is harder than it sound since they’re also dropped upon death… and if you haven’t figure this out by now, you will die. Probably a lot. These can take a lot more work to grind out, especially given that there are three types which correspond to different difficulty levels, and the two associated with more difficult missions won’t be available at all until you progress up the ladder. Still, ship upgrades are valuable, but they’re also more of a long term progression system. Finally we have War Medals and Super Credits. War Medals are the currency used to purchase items in “War Bonds” which are Helldivers 2’s battle passes. Super Credits are the game’s actual cash equivalent currency, used to purchase items in the “Super Store” as well as the War Bonds themselves.

Helldivers 2 takes a similar approach to Halo Infinite when it comes to battle passes and its purchases. War Bonds contain a number of cosmetic items, such as armor, helmets, banners, capes, and emotes, as well as the occasional new piece of equipment (including weapons) and even sometimes access to special stratagems. Essentially, everything you can progress in the game except for ship upgrades and your character’s level can be found in War Bonds. War Bonds are not time limited, so once you own one you can spend your Medals in whichever ones you want whenever you want, which is handy since you may very well find yourself trying to prioritize going after a few particular items in multiple War Bonds first. The Super Store works like Halo Infinite’s originally did, which is to say it’s unfortunately entirely based around FOMO. You’re presented with a small number of items, mostly just cosmetics, every couple of days. I’m not a huge fan of that system, but there aren’t that many items in rotation, and I’m not nearly as obsessed with cosmetics in this game as I was with Infinite either, thankfully. The inclusion of new weapons and other legitimately game changing items in the War Bonds and the store is a little controversial, as despite being an entirely cooperative game, there are naturally still “flavors of the month” and/or “meta” builds which often include them, but again, this is an entirely PvE game, so it’s not exactly “pay-to-win” in a way anything close to a more competitive game could be.

“You can optionally aim down sight/scope for extra precision.”

Beyond that, your ship lets you customize your character with those aforementioned armor sets, helmets, capes, banners, emotes, and most importantly, your primary and secondary weapons and grenades. These are just parts of your standard loadout, and not linked to the whole picking stratagems thing you do just before each drop, though perhaps just as important. There’s a good variety of weapon types, from assault rifles, shotguns, and DMR primary weapons, to pistols, grenade launchers, and even melee secondary weapons for those who like to experiment with different playstyles (or more likely, amusing “meme builds.”) Oh, and I should also mention that your armor comes in three different varieties, ranging from light to heavy, which trade off speed, mobility, and stamina for protection. Armor sets also includes a passive ability which usually grants the wearer a couple of bonuses, such as increased grenade capacity or reduced fire damage, for example. The basic armor in this game has a pretty cool, unique look to it, though designs for newer armors, as well as the designs of enemies and vehicles borrow liberally from all of the place. Of course, we have obvious Starship Troopers influence, but there’s also a little Halo, Planetside, Earth Defense Force, and perhaps even some Warhammer 40,000 in there as well. It’s not too blatant, and it mostly all gels into something fairly cohesive, and importantly there are no ultra ridiculous immersion-breaking cosmetics either, thankfully.

Progression can move pretty slow if you’re not pouring absolutely tons of time into mission after mission with a full squad. To get more, faster, you’ll want to progress to higher and higher difficulties. These grant more experience points (via a multiplier) and medals, plus access to those higher tiers of samples. The tradeoff, however, is that the mission types change and new enemies appear, including some massive, very difficult to kill ones. The most notable element here is the armor values at play, which ranges between unarmored, light to heavy armored, and tank, with several steps to many of these. To kill enemies with higher armor values you’ll need weapons that can penetrate or otherwise damage these types of armor. This means that as you progress, you’ll also want to develop your loadouts accordingly. For instance, playing solo I could easily wipe the floor on Medium difficulty, but recently moving up to Challenging and Hard and beyond, I ended up replacing my primary weapon with one that could do medium penetration, a secondary that could do anti-tank damage (for emergencies) and stratagems – a support weapon, an airstrike, and a sentry turret – that could all do heavy to anti-tank levels of damage.

“Solo. Checking my mini-map for blips – things were suspiciously quiet.”

Speaking of soloing, not only did I regularly play with my work buddy, but one of my old [TPG] chums Zabka (AKA JoeyPants) randomly started joining us too, and soon we had a fairly regular trio with the fourth often being filled by a friend of one or the other, or a rando. It was honestly a blast playing with a dedicated crew again, which was the icing on top of why this was my 2024 game of the year. Unfortunately, my work friend and I eventually stopped finding ourselves in-game at the same time, so we stopped playing together as much, and then Zabka just seemingly dropped off the face of the earth, and next thing I knew I found myself either having to play with squads of randoms again or going it alone. Playing solo in Helldivers 2 isn’t nearly as depressingly unsatisfying as it can be in many of these sorts of co-op focused games, but it’s also quite a bit more challenging given that less people means less stratagems, less eyes on the horizon, less shots coming from less angles, etc. It’s definitely doable, even up to the highest difficulty levels for highly skilled players, but it’s nowhere near as fun to me. As mentioned, I recently found myself hopping on and trying to improve my solo game, which meant quite a few tweaks to my loadout and tactics, but it’s been rewarding to see myself progress this way. This won’t really sustain me though, so sadly, unless any of my friends suddenly develop an interest in Helldivers 2, I’m likely more or less done with the game.

Regardless of whether I keep trudging away at solo dives, start playing with randoms again, find a new squad, or just hang up my cape entirely, I’ve absolutely loved my time with Helldivers 2 so far. If what I’ve described sounds at all enjoyable to you, especially if you have a few friends to play with, I’d highly recommend checking it out.

Politicians and Other Psychopaths

Returning to something more traditional for my partner and I, the good old narrative heavy modern take on the adventure game, which we’d played so many of together over the years, we played our very first ever Supermassive Games title, The Quarry. Supermassive is probably best known for its PlayStation exclusive Until Dawn, and from what I gather, there are quite a lot of similarities between the two games – I’d even read that The Quarry was the product of an aborted attempt to make an Until Dawn 2. For better or for worse, since I’ve yet to play Until Dawn, I won’t be tempted to fill this entire review with those kinds of fun comparisons. They’ve also got the Dark Pictures Anthology series, which I gather consists of similar, though smaller and generally less ambitious games that each tackle different horror subgenres.

“In true horror movie style, it doesn’t take long for shit to get real.”

Like those titles, The Quarry is also a horror game. I went into it somewhat blind, and was pleasantly surprised by having my assumptions about what the game was about quickly challenged – judging it by descriptions I’d read and trailers I’d seen, it looked like your stereotypical Friday the 13th style slasher affair. You know, a bunch of teens at a summer camp in the woods getting picked off one by one by a deranged psychopath, that sort of thing. It is that, but, being vague so that others might have the same experience as I did, it also, almost immediately, introduces monsters, witches, and weird Southern family tropes, which kept me guessing about where the story was actually going (at least for a little while) while being appropriately creepy throughout.

I have to say that The Quarry, overall, looks fantastic. The graphics are fairly realistic to the point of occasional moments of “uncanny valley” when it comes to those trickier to nail things like facial animations. Even more so because of their preference to base character faces on their actual voice actors, including some you’ll likely recognize – David Arquette’s character was featured heavily in promotional material, for instance. Overall though, the game looks really, really good. For the most part, the UI, hell, the entire presentation of the game, is also really nice and quite polished. Being that this was my first Supermassive game, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of quality, but this definitely feels a million miles away from your stereotypical low budget PC-only modern adventure game. Oh, and the audio here is all great too – the effects, music, and voice acting are very good, and more importantly, they’re all used really effectively too. On a technical level alone, most of my hesitation about jumping onto the Supermassive bandwagon quickly disappeared.

“Choices are usually binary and often timed.”

Gameplay-wise, The Quarry feels like a weird melding of your minimally interactive modern FMV or “interactive movie” games, like Late Shift, your old school, very interactive point and click adventure games, and the middle ground, something like Telltale’s Walking Dead series, for example. I think it works quite well, providing opportunities for puzzle solving and even action sequences as well as dialog choices and other decision making, while leaving a ton of room for setting the scene or advancing the narrative via long cutscenes. Interestingly, you’ll be jumping between playing each of a group of camp counselors, and the co-op mode lets you assign who plays which specific characters, and even lets you divide up the entire cast to different players via the online “Wolf Pack” mode. My partner and I divvied up the characters based on their profiles and swapped the controller as needed, which, in terms of who gets to play for how long, was more than a little random at times, but was fun and more tonally consistent than having to take turns making sometimes contradictory decisions as the same character.

“YESSS! A game the ridicules me for missing useless collectibles!”

I’m still of two minds over whether this is a actually bad thing, but sometimes these major branching moments didn’t come about by an obvious decision. For example, early in the game there was an action scene where, if we had reacted quickly enough, we could have killed a character which would have had a huge effect on the rest of the story, and the fact that this was based on a semi-twitchy, high pressure scene definitely caught us by surprise. Oh, and speaking of which, yes, major characters can die or be affected in very big ways that have ramifications throughout the rest of your playthrough, which was one of the charms of Telltale’s adventure games as well, and feels cranked up to 11 here. I understand this was also the case with Until Dawn and most of Supermassive’s other adventure games, and while this could be criticized as being gimmicky, personally, I’m a fan.

I can’t say I absolutely loved every character or every story beat, plus the ending felt a little sudden, which sadly isn’t an uncommon issue in these types of games. In this case though, I could definitely see myself playing through it again one of these days, especially given all of the fun extras and collectibles and the insane amount of deviation and branching your choices and actions can bring about – apparently there are 186 variations of the ending available. As I said, insane. In the end, we enjoyed it enough to buy the entire first season of the Dark Pictures Anthology the next time it was on sale. ‘Nuff said!

Next up, wanting to play an actual cooperative game on PC that wasn’t yet another tree punching survival game, I came across the We Were Here series of asymmetrical co-op games. Now, we’ve played a few co-op focused games, most notably the Hazelight ones, but reviews made We Were Here sound like it was much more likely to test the strength of our relationship. Now that’s true horror!

“A creepy castle filled with creepy puzzles.”

The setup is simple: Without much further explanation, you and your partner are walking with a larger group through a frozen wasteland and split off to check out and then take refuge in a mysterious castle. The next thing you know, you’re both waking up to discover that you’ve been split up. One player takes the role of the “librarian” whose primary job is to, confined to a small area, reference books and other useful objects spread throughout. The other player is the “explorer” whose job it is to, well, explore. That mostly involves navigating from room to room and investigating the mysteries therein, which ultimately lead to the way to the next area, like multiple relatively simple escape rooms chained together. Each player is given a walkie-talkie near the beginning to communicate with one another (using in-game VOIP, a feature I always really like even though I usually eventually end up abandoning for out-of-game voice chat) and from then on, the game is on.

Naturally, communication is key to solving these puzzles – the explorer might need to describe symbols or pictures to the librarian, or vice versa. That communication needs to actually be good too, as a lot of the things you’re asked to describe are intentionally extremely similar, so the players need to be detailed to avoid mistakes. There are also puzzles that involve one person helping the other person navigate through mazes, and as typical as that sounds, a lot of these scenarios have some pretty clever twists. Look, I grew up in the UK in the 80s and 90s and watched a ton of Knightmare, so I was more than up for the challenge. (If you know, you know!)

“Guiding the Explorer around a maze as the Librarian.”

While obviously done on a budget, the presentation is pretty good, featuring the same kind of low polygon, colorful, stylized graphics I mentioned learning to love with Firewatch when describing a lot of other games recently (I really need to find a term for this style…) and yet it manages to be quite creepy a lot of the time too. It’s definitely a vibe, and your mileage may vary, but it works for me.

Interestingly, the whole thing only lasts a couple of hours, though you’ll likely want to switch roles and play it a second time, especially if you’re into achievement hunting. Still, the game is often free, and as such, makes a perfect demo for the rest of the series. That strategy certainly worked on us – we were impressed with it enough to immediately turn around and purchase the sequel, We Were Here Too, which I’m sure I’ll talk about here eventually.

Finally, we’ve just completed our playthrough of The Council. The Council is an episodic narrative heavy adventure game developed by Big Bad Wolf, who are probably best known for their later take on the Vampire: The Masquerade universe with Swansong in 2023. I don’t know too much about Swansong, but it appears to use a lot of the same gameplay mechanics as The Council, though it has significantly worse reviews. Hmm. This might just be a result of The Council attracting more of a niche, adventure game loving audience than Swansong, which probably attracted a lot of players hoping for a sequel to the cult classic Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which it clearly is not.

“If you think these guys are ugly, you should see Sir Gregory Holm!”

I distinctly recall having some hesitations about this game when first coming across it on the Microsoft Store, but my partner was very intrigued and its reviews were surprisingly positive, so we eventually purchased it. It’s funny, we played them far enough apart that I didn’t really compare it to The Quarry while playing it, but now writing this compiled review, I can’t help but to weigh them against each other, at least a little, given that they’re in the same genre of gameplay. On the surface, this does not bode well at all for The Council, but in some ways, The Council is actually much more interesting.

The main reason for my hesitation was the visual presentation. Screenshots and trailers made this game look almost comically bad looking. You have a variety of historical figures, like Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington, with ugly, stylized character models, and hey, there’s some kind of a murder mystery or something afoot too? Seriously, what the fuck is this game?! While I have to stand by that initial impression of the graphics, particularly the character faces, as being bizarre, sometimes exaggerated to the extent of being grotesque, overall, I actually came to enjoy the style once I got used to it. This will no doubt be a divisive point though – I’d expect a lot of people will absolutely loath them. That said, the scenery, particularly inside of Lord Mortimer’s mansion, where you’ll be spending the majority of the game, was well executed. Really, the only technical issues with the visuals are around the character animations, which range from “eh, decent I guess” to utterly abysmal. Well, actually, the bottom of that range would be “not there at all” as we did encounter a few bugged moments where characters weren’t animated at all while their dialog played. All but one of these instances were brief enough to not take us completely out of the game though, thankfully.

“Flashback to classic adventure games.”

The bulk of my impressions were around the gameplay though. On the surface The Council seems to follow a Telltale-like take on the adventure game – a lot of dialog choices, decisions which appear to branch the storyline, and plenty of cutscenes. I’d say that there’s a lot more free roaming and even the odd inventory puzzle in The Council, and there are no real QTE scenes since there are no real action scenes, so this edges it a bit closer to the traditional point and click adventure game of the 90s. Where this gets interesting is that there is a layer of almost RPG-like mechanics on top of all of this: a skill-based system complete with experience points to advance those skills, traits that affect them, and using skills requires spending limited “effort points.” I was initially skeptical…

To go into that all in just a bit more detail, many of your dialog choices and some of your special actions in the game are tied to specific skills. Using these skills requires you to have the skill, of course, and the use of a set amount of effort points, which is reduced depending on what level your skill is at. You level these skills up as you gain experience from chapter to chapter, and there are also books that you can read in limited quantities each chapter, and traits which can sometimes grant you skill points as well. Interestingly, you will still see the options to use these skills even if you don’t have them, which can help guide you to where you might want to allocate skill points later, or in a subsequent playthrough, though every skill gets its turn sooner or later. Your pool of effort points grows as you level up, but can also be affected by items – you’ll find consumables that let you restore some of your points or even make your next skill use free. There’s also one that removes your alterations, which negatively affect the number of effort points you need to use a skill.

“The Council’s dialog system is surprisingly complex.”

The dialog system also has a few other surprises. First, there are “confrontations” which are special dialog events in which you need to choose the correct options in order to convince someone of something or win an argument, that kind of thing, and your success or failure will often cause a decision-like branching of the story. These all felt a lot more tense than normal conversations, even if the stakes weren’t particularly high. Confrontations are particularly affected by that character’s specific vulnerabilities and immunities to certain skills, which are usually discovered the hard way by choosing the wrong dialog option, though there’s another consumable that will temporarily reveal them to you. Finally, we have “opportunities” which are as close as The Council gets to Telltale’s QTEs – moments where you can, if you’re quick enough, move your cursor to an interactive hotspot that appears briefly, usually over part of the character you’re talking to’s face or body. These unlock special dialog or actions, often revealing new information, including vulnerabilities and immunities.

Overall, some of these systems were a bit bewildering at first, but in the end I think they work surprisingly well, and add a nice gamey component to the otherwise rather simple dialog system that most of these sorts of games employ.

Finally, there’s the story itself. If you’re the type of person who likes ancient and old world conspiracy theory along the lines of something like the Da Vinci Code, you might be as drawn in as I initially was. Right off the bat we have something of a “whodunit” mystery, all kinds of mysterious characters and related subplots, and a backdrop of political intrigue complete with secret societies attempting to pull the strings of events across the entire world. I constantly found myself wanting to learn more about what was really going on here, at least until the rather heavy-handed main reveal (something of a twist) comes in a later episode. While I found that twist, which brings in a supernatural element, and especially my character’s reactions to it to be a little silly, by then I was invested enough to say “fuck it” and just roll with it.

“Like I said, confrontations can feel a little tense…”

Unfortunately, the end of the game was a bit of a let down. There was a final confrontation which just… well, it just suddenly ended. As the game summed up how bad of a job we’d done in the last chapter and the post-game character wrap-up started to play, it took my partner and I a full 30 more seconds to realize what had just happened before we looked at each other and let out a simultaneous “OOOOOOooooooooohhhhh!” It was jarring enough that we did something we never do in these kinds of narrative games – loaded up our last save, corrected a mistake we made (an easy to miss but vital item we didn’t pick up) and went through it again, this time achieving a much better, even if it was similarly abrupt, ending. This does speak of one of the game’s strengths though, in that, not unlike The Quarry, there is a good amount of deviation and branching that can take place here, with over a dozen distinct endings. In fact, there was one major decision in the second to last chapter of the game that really had us debating amongst ourselves about which way to go, which should suggest it was an interesting and impactful one if nothing else.

That sums up The Council pretty well. Despite the weird, somewhat janky graphics and the plot that goes to some unexpected places, then ends faaaarrrr too abruptly, I enjoyed the game, especially its take on the narrative adventure mechanics, which has me suddenly much more curious about Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, a game that hadn’t really been on my radar even a little bit before.

Unfortunately my dumb ass didn’t take enough screenshots of any of these games, and some of the ones I did take contained spoilers, so instead I’ve opted to steal them from various random places on the net.

New Year, New PC

“Big, expensive pile o’ hardware.”

As mentioned in my last post, here’s a little insight into the decisions that went into my new build. This could hopefully help some new builders make decisions regarding their own component selections in the future, though many of the parts selected for this build will be ancient history in only a matter of months. So it goes!

Initial Goals:

Since I’ve had the luxury of enough money to be selective, I’ve used a simple methodology for my own personal PC builds, and I’ve always been pleased with the results. I start by looking at popular, commonly recommended specs and specific components, and then do a huge amount of research on those components, tweaking them to avoid technical issues as well as conform to my own brand and feature preferences. Most importantly, I will adjust those components until I hit the sweet spot between performance and price – usually there is a very obvious cutoff where spending more goes above what I’m comfortable with and/or no longer feels like a reasonable upgrade for the cost. The end result is typically a premium spin on a mid range gaming machine that has just enough added oomph to serve me well for productivity purposes, and last a very, very long time with (hopefully) minimal issues. My current (now old) machine has lasted me 8 years and is still going relatively strong, with only a couple of minor upgrades along the way, and I had my last machine for a similar amount of time.

The thing is, having my PCs stick around so long was never really a stated goal. It’s a combination of being somewhat frugal with my money (read: cheap) and also absolutely hating migrating from one primary machine to another. I usually make a ton of tweaks to my systems, I run servers, do development, and do a bit of casual data hoarding. It’s by far the most unpleasant part of building a new machine for me. This time around, I’ve decided that I can no longer deny that truth – I’m going to purposely build a machine that can last me a ridiculously long time. Of course, it’s hard to predict everything that could happen in the next ~8 years, but I can at least do a couple of things that can help.

First, I’ll invest more in the basics like CPU and RAM upfront. Since heavy multitasking, including running some VMs, will be my primary use-case outside of gaming, I’ll want to go with a processor which both has a ton of cores as well as great gaming performance. I’ll also start with an unreasonably large amount of RAM. Second, I’ll spec some of these parts in a way that will more easily allow for an upgrade at around the midpoint of this PC’s lifespan – For example, I’d like to be able to relatively easily swap in a new CPU and/or GPU without needing to replace my motherboard, if possible. This means perhaps spending a tiny bit more now for features I might only be using down the line.

The timing of this build is interesting and needs a mention too. I’d originally had loose plans to build a new machine sometime later in 2025, but as an American, the threat of large tariffs on imports from many countries, not the least being China, possibly driving up component prices became much more realistic after the election in November 2024. My decision to bump up my build to late 2024 also happened to coincide with the innumerable end of November sales associated with the the holidays, particularly the weeks of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As such, despite the very recent launch of AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 series and looming announcements from NVIDIA about the RTX GeForce 5000 series, I decided to dive in right then and there.

CPU Selection:

This is usually the most logical place to start with any build, as it will dictate my motherboard selection, what memory I need, etc. and the rest will kind of fall into place from there.

I was immediately confronted with a lot of unexpected complications right out of the gate. While I won’t go into detail here, the high-end Intel CPUs like the 13900K and 14900K I was looking at, really all 13th and 14th generation Intel CPUs, have had some controversial issues around stability. I also have some (relatively minor) concerns over their whole “performance core” vs “efficiency core” scheduling thing.

This led me to looking at AMD’s Ryzen processors, which have been making big waves for a while now. I was immediately impressed to learn how much less power they draw and heat they generate, which practically sold me all by itself. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D seemed like the obvious choice for both gaming and productivity, but I quickly discovered all of the numerous multitasking issues associated with its 16 cores being divided between 2 different chiplet dies, and only one including the 3D cache. I almost went with this regardless, as the common workaround of using Process Lasso or similar tools to manually assign programs to the two different CCDs didn’t seem too challenging, but the deeper I looked, the more I discovered reports of incompatibility with certain programs (specifically games) and some other big issues that only added to the potential headaches involved in using this processor. I run a lot of older applications and games, so such incompatibilities are a bit scarier to me than they might be for your average gamer who is only playing the latest releases.

Speaking of gamers, a lot of people recommended the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which apparently still beats the 7950X3D and virtually all other newer processors when it comes to pure gaming. With only 8 symmetrical cores/16 threads living on a single die, the 7800X3D doesn’t have any of the core scheduling issues the 7950X3D has. Of course, it also has half the cores. That said, I find the commonly repeated recommendation that you need a 7950X3D for productivity while the 7800X3D is only for gaming to be a little reductive. My relatively ancient 4 core I7 can handle productivity tasks, including running a dedicated VM, quite well. With double the cores, and many games using 6 cores or less, this should be a huge improvement for me. I’m also not gaming for hours every day these days (sadly) and the type of productivity work I do doesn’t require crunching a huge amount of data (rendering, etc.) that would greatly benefit by throwing more cores into the mix. With that, I settled on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

“Freshly installed!”

I should mention that when I started working on this the Ryzen 7 9800X3D had only just been released. Coming in at very close to the same price as the 7800X3D with all of the other advantages of it along with being ~10% faster, this might have been a more logical choice if it weren’t so new, and availability and subsequent artificial price increases weren’t a thing. I’m not worried about this, but I am really intrigued to see what the next generation or two of 7950X3D equivalent processors look like – maybe some of their issues will be sorted out, whether by AMD or Microsoft. In any case, I’m thinking I’ll end up throwing something from the last line of AM5 processors into this thing when/if I do my mid-life upgrade, assuming my motherboard can support it.

While I’m on the subject, I’ll use a Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE on this for cooling. I used a Silent Assassin on another recent build and these coolers are quite well regarded, especially for their price. The 7800X3D doesn’t need anything too crazy, but this is a nice enough cooler to work with something beefier way down the line, and I’d rather go a bit heavy handed with cooling than have thermal issues later, and this thing is still quite cheap regardless.

Motherboard Selection:

This is the decision I struggled with the most. At first, I was pointed to B650 chipset motherboards, of which there are a huge number and some with very nice feature sets, though uncomfortably high prices and a general lack of availability often accompany the higher end boards. Initially I settled on the MSI MAG Tomahawk B650 WIFI due to having great VRM timings which would hopefully help support a future processor upgrade and/or future overclocking endeavors, along with the rest of its feature set. There are better choices, but again, my selection was heavily tempered by price and availability, and I’ve had good luck with MSI products in the past.

The biggest thing the Tomahawk B650 lacked was PCIe Gen 5 support. Now, I don’t currently need PCIe Gen 5 support, but I kept coming back to the idea of “future proofing” this build for a mid-life upgrade. While a Gen 5 GPU likely won’t be required even then, having it available will at least give me more options. The same is true with PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives – current testing suggests that they run incredibly hot, and unless you’re very comfortable with an optimized cooling setup, should probably be avoided for now if you don’t have a legitimate need for such blazing speeds, so I’m not going to worry about them. In the future, Gen 5 NVMEs might improve in that area, so this is another “nice to have.”

Naturally, I started looking at the MSI Tomahawk X670E WIFI instead. This motherboard includes a single Gen 5 PCIe x16 slot and a single Gen 5 M.2 slot, while overall being a fairly similar board. Another notable feature is the inclusion of an ALC1200 chip instead of ALC4080 for sound. This is a minor concern, and which one of these codec chips is better is fairly contested, but the tried and trusted ALC1200 feels like less of a potential problem, and sound is important to me. In fact, this will be the first time I’ve put together a personal build that doesn’t include a dedicated sound card (although, if I do end up having any sound issues, that will be an early upgrade!)

Anyway, one basic requirement this motherboard doesn’t meet is that I was hoping to have two onboard NICs. One improvement I’m going to make to my server setup with this machine is to have my primary VM use a dedicated NIC on its own a segregated VLAN. I could accomplish this with only one NIC using VLAN tagging, sure, but quite a lot of desktop NIC drivers don’t support 802.1x and I’ve even had one that did lose all of its associated configuration options after a driver update. Yikes. Two NICs is ultimately more reliable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any AM5 motherboards that included this option and were reasonably priced, so I’m going to throw a Intel EXPI9301CTBLK Gigabit Network Card into one of my slower PCIe slots.

Back to the subject of the motherboard, unfortunately, the more I researched MSI’s line of AM5 motherboards, the more issues I ran across. Honestly, you’ll find issues that are at least a little concerning with ANY motherboard if you dig enough, but there were a couple of widespread issues that required me to make some major changes to my early part choices. This almost scared me off of MSI entirely, but ultimately I feel like my concessions were fine.

Memory Selection:

Continuing from the above, first of all, people complaining about memory issues and associated stability problems, often related to using XMP and especially EXPO, with DDR5, is common. During troubleshooting, whether or not the memory is officially supported is one related concern. I’d initially selected the cheapest set of G.Skill EXPO RAM I could find, the Flare X5. While lower capacity kits are in the compatibility list, the exact one I picked was not. After looking at my options for quite a while, I eventually settled on the slightly more expensive G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo which is on the list, is well regarded, and reviews suggest it works well with EXPO.

As for how much, I opted for 16 GB on my current build, but decided to throw another 16 in a year or two ago after running into some issues while gaming with my RAM hungry web browser (with far too many tabs open) running. 32 GB is plenty, but again, future proofing! Initially I only wanted to make sure I had a motherboard with 4 DIMM slots (spoilers: they almost all do) but quickly discovered that with these AM5 chipsets, running more than a single pair isn’t advised. At the very least, you’ll probably need to run your memory at a lower speed, and at worst, stability issues seem to be common. This is pretty lame, but reinforces my impulse to double what I currently have and start with 64 GB. Hopefully I won’t need to replace it if I do my mid-life upgrade.

Storage Selection:

Obviously I’ll want a Gen 4 M.2 NVME drive for my OS and primary storage. Right now I have a 500 GB SATA SSD and I threw another 1 TB M.2 drive in there a couple of years back to have more places to dump games after getting a little low on storage more than a few times. Given my current usage habits, a 2 TB drive seems perfect.

I also have a 3 TB spinning disk RAID 1 for more archival storage, though my VM disks also live there. My initial impulse was to forgo the RAID this time and just throw another, bigger Gen 4 M.2 NVME in. This was cemented after researching what RAID options were available to me with this motherboard and discovering that it’s apparently an “all disks or nothing” setup, which is frankly terrible. I could always try to find a more suitable motherboard or perhaps an add-on RAID controller card, but for now I think scheduling a backup job to replicate some of my storage data to my NAS (which is a 13 TB RAID 1) will be adequate. A single 4 TB drive it is!

Originally, I chose the universally lauded Western Digital Black SN850X for both purposes. There are cheaper drives to be had, of course, but these ones are always recommended for speed and reliability and are often on sale for good prices. Returning to the subject of motherboard issues, however, apparently there’s a defect with these Tomahawk AM5 boards (and perhaps others?) where the SN850X won’t be detected at boot up. While it seems not everyone is impacted, apparently this issue suddenly appeared after a BIOS update and still hasn’t been fixed a year or two later, leaving people stuck running a much older BIOS release or moving their disks to another, slower M.2 slot. I decided to avoid this potential debacle altogether, and began looking at alternatives. I finally settled on the Crucial T500 for my OS drive. Crucial has been a trusted name for me in the past, and this drive includes DRAM cache, performs similarly to the SN850X, and is priced similarly too. I also chose a Crucial P3 Plus for my storage drive. This is also a speedy Gen 4 NVME, but lacks that cache for a price that’s a little easier to swallow.

GPU Selection

While I bounced between NVIDIA and AMD (ATI) graphic cards a lot back in the day, I’ve been a staunch NVIDIA GeForce fan for a long time now, and a recent build in which I used an AMD renewed that preference yet again. I just don’t love their driver / configuration utility. I’d personally prefer to pay a bit more for what I feel is a much smoother experience in terms of features and functionality. That’s not to say I’m afraid of change though – I’ve also been a 1080p 60 holdout for ages now, and I think it’s finally time to go to 1440p after being very happy with the results of that same build. Given the prevalence of G-Sync and FreeSync compatibility these days, it also seems reasonable to also go up to a higher refresh display, which I can always lock to a lower refresh rate if I can’t stand for one reason or another.

“It’s alive!”

Now, my GPUs selection strategy has always been to go with an upper end, middle tier card. For instance, my current build has a vendor overclocked GTX 1070 which I got near the start of that generation in it and it’s still going fairly strong – zero regrets! With all of this in mind, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 4070 Ti Super seems to fit the mold perfectly. A bit more expensive, sure, but again, I’m going for longevity here. I was originally going to go with one of the cheapest ones available, the MSI Ventus 3X, but discovered that I could get that card’s slightly shorter, and now on sale, little brother the MSI Shadow 3X OC for cheaper, and without needing to order it directly from MSI. In any case, between my mobo and now my GPU, I guess this is going to be an MSI heavy build.

Monitor Selection:

So, given what I just said about picking a GPU, I don’t have to say too much here. Essentially, I just wanted a well-reviewed 27” or bigger 1440P 120 Hz+ monitor. I took a look around at some YouTube recommendation videos and narrowed my choice down to a few readily available budget monitors pretty quickly, settling on Acer Nitro XV1 XV271U which is a 1440P 180 Hz IPS monitor with pretty great reviews within its tier, with the usual caveats for a cheap IPS panel that it’s not going to have anything resembling decent HDR and its black levels and back lighting in general probably won’t be anywhere close to amazing. I’m fine with that for now, as just with TVs, while you can get some really good stuff for really cheap these days, the very best screens are still quite expensive. For the price I paid for this ($170 new) I can always replace it down the line if I feel particularly compelled to, and I probably won’t!

I also grabbed a little HDMI to DVI converter so I could keep using my old Dell 2007FPb 20” 1600×1200 monitor as a secondary display. Hopefully this works well enough, as I’ve been unable to come to grips with possibly abandoning my second screen. If I had, I’d probably have gone with a bigger primary monitor. For now, I prefer using multiple monitors, and having a dedicated 4:3 for running older PC and console games full screen is a nice bonus.

Case, Power, and Cooling:

The only real requirement I had for a case besides supporting my ATX motherboard and not looking like something off the Vegas strip, was that I wanted to bring my Plextor DVD-RW drive over from my current PC. Call me a fossil, but I do still have the rare occasion to read a CD or DVD, and possibly even write one. For better or worse, this requirement VASTLY slimmed my number of options down to single digits. I mean, I knew cases without any exposed drive bays were popular these days, but I didn’t know that they were being made almost exclusively that way. I ended up opting for a Fractal Design Pop Solid which is a pretty nice, somewhat budget case with two 5.25” drive bays hidden behind a little door. I’ve been happy with Fratcal’s cases in the past – in fact, my current machine is using one which I could have just re-used if it weren’t for making the transition practically impossible to do without a lot of downtime.

As a quick aside, in retrospect I’m a little upset with myself for not looking into smaller form factors. While they don’t save you a ton of space unless you specifically target going for as small of a footprint as you can handle, I still hate how monstrously big even a modest mid tower ATX case can be. My last build was a Micro ATX and I’m happy with it. I’ve also been reviving an old ITX build recently too. There’s two main reasons why I didn’t put much effort into going that route. First of all, case availability, as mentioned. Yet, there is actually a ”Fractal Design Pop Mini” which is practically the same case, only downsized for mATX builds, and it still includes those external bays. So, no excuses there. Beyond that, I could have easily sourced an older mATX case with external 5.25” bays too. The second, actually decent reason, is that there aren’t a lot of mATX options in the AM5 range that had the features I was looking for. In fact, there’s only a single nice mATX X670E board out there, and it’s been discontinued for long enough to drive the prices up to insane territory. Oh well. That size and weight should only be an issue when I want to move my box around for cleaning or other maintenance.

As for cooling, at first I figured the 3 included 120 mm case fans should be enough to keep the air moving well enough, but upon watching several reviews of the case I noticed a pattern of comments related to airflow, particularly affecting GPU temperatures. An easy fix is just to replace the 3 120mm Fractal Designs Aspect 12 fans with something a bit better. Since this was an unplanned, last minute addition, I ended up staying on the inexpensive side, but a Thermalright TL-G12B (120mm) for rear exhaust and 2 Thermalright TL-C14s (140mm) for front intake should greatly improve the situation. Both models have superior airflow to Fractal’s stock fans and are PWM controlled so can run slower and more quietly when I’m not gaming to boot. These replacement fans may not have really been needed, but could hopefully help in a future upgrade scenario, and this was only a ~$24 addition.

My PSU is another area I purposely went a little overboard with. By my estimates, a 750 watt power supply would have been totally fine with this build, but just in case of mid-life upgrades, I bumped it up to an 850 watt unit. I also don’t like to cheap out too much on my PSUs, so a 80+ Gold certified or better PSU is a must. Looking at some detailed reviews, tier lists, etc., I settled on a be quiet! Pure Power 12 M 850 W Fully Modular ATX Power Supply. It’s also ATX 3.1 spec’d, making wiring it up to my 4070 Ti Super a little cleaner, and further hopefully helping to ensure compatibility with a new GPU 4 or 5 years down the road. This is my first “be quiet!” brand anything, but reviews are great and the company has quite a generous warranty, so I don’t have any real worries there.

Peripherals:

I didn’t have much reason to abandon my current peripherals for this build, so I’ll be migrating my HyperX headset, my Razer keyboard and mouse, and my old Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers over. Yes, I’m as shocked as anyone that my old Razer gear is all still working after all these years (although I did replace my old DeathAdder Chroma mouse with Naga Trinity several years back, but more for the optional MMORPG button configuration than any functional issue with the DeathAdder.)

“I don’t actually play Helldivers 2 with a controller…”

The one purchase I did make was an 8bitdo Ultimate 2C Wireless Controller. This is a significant change of direction for me, because outside of emulating much older consoles, I don’t ever play PC games with anything but mouse and keyboard. With this new build though I’ve decided to tee up some console-like games in my Steam backlog, and wanted a suitable controller. I could have gone with my tried and true Xbox Series X or Xbox One controller, but instead decided to purchase something completely dedicated. The Ultimate 2C has very similar ergonomics to my beloved Xbox controllers, but despite its dirt cheap price tag, has scored some pretty impressive reviews. I’ve barely used it, but so far so good. Oh, I went with the limited edition “blueberry” color scheme, for the record.

That’s about it. Beyond all of this, the logistics around ordering so many things from numerous places can be a minor challenge, and the actual assembly is, of course, its own thing, as is making numerous adjustments to Windows 11 to make it suck a little less. In some ways, Windows 11 has been far more of adjustment than I’d have hoped for, and I definitely vastly prefer Windows 10. Back to hardware though, the only post-build change I’ve made so far has been to replace all of my case fan mounting screws with rubber pop-in “screws” (like this) to dampen an annoying pulsating hum I was getting from my 140mm fans. Despite seeing them around and probably even getting some as pack-ins before, I’d actually never used them personally or professionally before, but I’m glad to report that they seemed to do the trick. Anyway, you made it to the end. If you found this while working on your own build, good luck!