Gaming

I don't believe in the separation between business and leisure. I believe that, on one hand, business and remunerated work is something which we should embrace as a part of our lives, and on the other hand, leisure and fun is not in any way less important, less productive or incompatible with business.

This is particularly true in the videogame industry. As such, I think some people will find interest in my commenting on the games that I have played the most, what I enjoyed about them and what I think about their different aspects. I also believe it says a lot about how I approach most things in life, due to how important and central videogames are for me.

I started playing videogames when I was 5 years old, and I have spent dozens of thousands of hours playing, most of it on PC platform. Here I include some of the ones I played the most or which have had the most influence on me, starting from the most recent.

Beat Saber

Music has always been something that I feel particularly intensely. I also discovered during my early adult years that I do like dancing, when it is to music that connects properly with me. When I bought a Virtual Reality headset and tried Beat Saber, as many other people before me, I got hooked. A few months later, due to the frustration of not finding maps for songs that I really enjoyed (and would like to play in the game), or finding maps that were unsatisfactory, I finally decided to take on mapping them myself. While I definitely try to discover new tastes by trying songs that I didn't know beforehand, I still find that my ability to connect properly with the music is fundamental to my enjoyment of a Beat Saber map. Moreover, the act of mapping a song itself is enjoyment by itself and allows you to comprehend and connect with the song on so many levels.

Over time this has grown to be a very big aspect for me, now being a pretty deeply embedded member of the Beat Saber mapping community. I have contributed some tools, knowledge and mentorship to other mappers and plan to continue doing this for quite a while. My Beat Saver profile, containing the maps that I have done, can be found here .

Doom Eternal (Getting into speedrunning)

As described below, I played DOOM 2016 and fell in love with it, even if I got to it years after its release. As such, I awaited Doom Eternal's release with expectation. While I think DOOM 2016 was better in certain things than Doom Eternal, overall Doom Eternal continued to take many risks and change the game in many ways that make it even more enjoyable for me to replay. So much so, that I decided to get into speedrunning through it. Since then, I have briefly speedrun other games, but Doom Eternal remains my main speedrunning game.

While I have never been a world record competitor, I have reasonably good times and I am a quite active member in the speedrunning community, finding skips, techniques and discussing routes very often. In fact, after a while, I discovered that routing is the most enjoyable part of speedrunning for me. The main categories I have always been interested on is 100% Ultra-Nightmare, initially on the Restricted ruleset; though later I turned my attention to Nightmare 100%, Extra Life Mode and Unrestricted. You can see the recording of the run I'm most proud of above.

In the present, I am deep in the process of preparing a Tool Assisted Speedrun of the Nightmare 100% Unrestricted category. This is a very unexplored category, with 100% players mostly choosing the Restricted ruleset due to it feeling more authentic to the gameplay, and some Unrestricted tech and tricks being extremely hard to do in a regular run, and run-killing if failed. However, in a Tool Assisted Speedrun (with segments), you can overcome these difficulties and make the most out of the glitchiness of the game.

At some point I also made a long video discussing the most effective ways to kill each demon type in Doom Eternal (also linked above). Some of those techniques have changed since the video, due to discovering new weapon tech and approaches to enemies and mechanics we weren't fully aware of before, but it's still a very good source of information for a player who is decent at the game but is looking to start their road to becoming truly good at it.

I feel that Doom Eternal's combination of movement and combat is fantastic. It gives you much more freedom of movement than DOOM (2016), and is more heavily focused on resource management than on simply avoiding getting hit. Combat has an important element of speed, precision and aiming, but what I love is that Doom Eternal combat feels more like a dance in which you are trying to keep the rhythm of the beat, than something you're trying to get done as quickly as possible. Pacing over speed. While the story of the game is ridiculous (and very aware of it), and I feel the game is a little bit too linear and could have benefit from more open-ended levels, I feel the visuals, the combat and the movement all work together to provide an extremely satisfying experience.

DOOM (2016)

As described below, I played the old Doom games probably not when they were released but closer to then than to today. I loved them and they formed a fundamental part of my gaming experience.

When I finally tried the 2016 Doom game in 2019, I was immediately in love. It's not that it just captures the essence of the old games, is that it outputs the right kind of evolution that you would expect in a modern game from these ideas. It totally reinvents the shooter genre that I had basically grown fed up of long ago, and it creates in me the will to become as good at it as I can. It's a game where striving for perfection is viable. Plenty of reviews are available online in many formats describing all the reasons why this game is simply great, and if you haven't heard of them, I encourage you to take a look at them.

I played semi-hardcore until Doom Eternal came out, not speedrunning it but  completing it in Ultra-Nightmare difficulty once (and attempting many more times).

Warframe

I started playing Warframe back in 2014, while looking for a heavily cooperative game to play with my partner. I immediately loved the looter style heavily influenced by Diablo, coupled with the frantic movement, a captivating lore and story and a nearly endless progression scheme (that after many years I am still far from reaching the end of). I stopped playing between 2016 and 2019, and briefly returned in 2019.

Warframe is a Frankenstein of a game with so many mechanics and ideas working together that it can sometimes be dizzying. One of my biggest problems with Warframe is that after just a week without playing, coming back can be daunting because I don't know where to start. Then again, it is a very indulging game which doesn't force you to play continuedly or make it hard for you to return, but for obsessive-compulsive people that want to optimize everything like me, choosing just what to do can be the hardest part of the game.

A very valid complaint about the game is often that it is too easy. This is something that the developers have repeatedly tried to address by adding endgame content that is challenging without being a requirement. There is still plenty of room for improvement in that aspect, but as a casual game to play in a chilled out way with some friends it has very few contenders. The depth of its role-playing aspects, through the insane amount of Warframes, weapons, mods and other perks to acquire, level up and optimize is also sure to keep you playing for a while.

Warframe is a very imperfect game with so much beauty and fun to it.

Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering, Arena

Hearthstone came to be the addiction replacement of Dota 2 (explained below) for me. I currently have thousands of hours spent into it, as well as hundreds of euros. I haven't played in about a year, but before that, for about a year or two I consistently made it into legend almost every season. I always played Wild for the interest in as many interactions as possible. Hearthstone is terribly addictive, but it can also be a terribly good game at times. It is less frustrating than Dota 2 as a heavily addictive game because the games are shorter, together with the 1-on-1 format as opposed to Dota's team format, which make it a lot less painful to feel that you're losing due to teammates or wasting huge amounts of time, and the ability to experiment more at your own pace without teammates getting angry at you.

Nonetheless, and as much as I praise Hearthstone as truly deep game that makes you think a lot and which features an incredible depth and incredible amount of tactics and strategies, it has flaws. Most of these have been thoroughly pointed out by the community but I shall offer my own perspective.

Randomness in Hearthstone is too rampant and can be too game changing. Developers have stated multiple times that they like the randomness in Hearthstone because it creates unpredictability, extreme situations and varied encounters, all of which is true, but which could be achieved without essentially breaking entire strategies due to their high reliance and/or vulnerability to randomness.

Similarly, the game's pace has often failed to be defined, and over the course of time and expansions, it has slowly become quicker and quicker, and it is now at a point where almost all viable strategies (at least in Wild) are one of two high-level archetypes: Aggressive (for as-quick-as-possible win through tempo) or combo-based (one turn kills, for as-quick-as-possible unavoidable wins). Midgame strategies have been dead in the game since before I even started playing, at a competitive level, and control strategies have died a slow death, being squished between aggressive strategies being too hard to keep back and combo strategies being too quick to prevent. Before I stopped playing, a new hybrid archetype (that I actually love) arised, with extreme and very effective disruption cards being added into the game: Hypercontrol, meaning mostly control decks that can defend against combo decks adequately and also produce combos themselves, without being one-trick-ponies. That is, extremely flexible decks that aim for long games and being three steps ahead of your opponent, playing as much with your opponents deck as you play with yours. I love this playstyle.

The fundamental issue that I see with the game as it is is that its simplified mechanics as compared to other trading card games have made card draw and draw order too relevant (another form of randomness) that makes games often be decided by "will I draw the card that I need to win this game". At this point I don't think the game can be saved from that because it is ingrained in its fundamentals (though the developers have tried to).

It is still a terribly fun and terribly engaging game to play, and the focus on single player experience in the last expansions is definitely a way to draw away from the competitiveness of player versus player and embrace the randomness, the unexpected and the glaringly overpowered in a way that does not hurt anyone. It is definitely loads of fun, even if it doesn't take very long to become repetitive.

I tried MTGA a few years before stopping Hearthstone, never quite playing both of them but alternating between them on different periods. I never quite liked tabletop Magic because my tendency to like highly complex decks and interactions means that playing them physically would both make the games extremely long and tedious, and also quite expensive (since most cards with complex interactions are on the expensive side). However, MTGA automates card mechanic resolution in a very effective way, and it's easier to acquire cards in it than physical cards. As such, MTGA captivated me. It can definitely be a lot more complex than Hearthstone, it also has a lot more room for managing deck weaknesses and it does not tend to feel as much rock-paper-scissors as Hearthstone. That said, its games can often be way too long, aggressive decks are still rampant in its primary gamemodes, and on top of the randomness of card draw (somehow a little less horrible due to the slightly slower pace than Hearthstone, but stitll a big limiting factor), it adds the very well known issue of land randomness (will I draw too many lands, or not enough lands?). Some players will argue this keeps the game under control (which is true), but I am of the opinion that it does so at too high a cost, completely blocking some strategies and overall making games way too often feel like a dice roll. Keeping the game under control could be handled through other mechanics. Of course, MTG is way too established and old a game to change at this point, but it's something that can be learned for other games.

Currently, I mostly play Historic Brawl; so with larger card pool, but the commander aspect provides increased consistency in the games and reduced exposition to card draw randomness, and the limit on one copy of each card makes the games slower and more strategic, making aggressive decks less overpowering and control decks easier to play around, providing overall a lot more variety and interesting games, in my opinion. Of course, games tend to last longer, which is what drives away a lot of people.

Bloodline Champions

Bloodline Champions at first sight seems a variation of the moba gameplay, but truth is its gameplay has only far ressemblances to moba games. With games going to best of X rounds, each round lasting around 2-4 minutes and its intense arena class-based gameplay with heroes featuring 6 basic skills, an ultimate, 2 modified skills and 2 active medallions, and all skills being aim-based, Bloodline Champions is one of the most twitch and quick decision intense PvP games there has ever been. I have over 7000 games of Bloodline Champions, always having been a slightly above average player. Bloodline Champions is a game which has also experienced big lack of player issues and problems between its developers (Stunlock Studios) and its publisher (FunCom). However, the game itself has always been as smooth as it can get, and I can firmly say the level of competition and at the same time the really fine tune balance between the different characters and playstyles existing in Bloodline Champions is unmatched by almost all PvP games. Besides the lack of players and the fact that the players who stay to play it tend to be particularly good at the game, the fact that it has only 23 classes makes Bloodline Champions slightly repetitive after... 7000 games.

Diablo, Diablo 2 & Diablo 3

I started playing the original Diablo back in 1999, when I was 8 years old, and it was the first time I played an online game. This part of my life clearly conditioned my predisposition to RPG games and dark ambiences. I formed part of the small Spanish Diablo community back in the day, participating in several clans and creating my core gamer personality.

A couple of years later I started playing Diablo 2 and its expansion, Lord of Destruction, finishing the development that had started with Diablo, and making me a gamer for the rest of my life. I played Diablo 2 countless hours with countless people, creating countless characters and passing through countless experiences which clearly determined the kind of player I am today. Little can be said that anyone reading this doesn't know about the absolute importance and key role Diablo 2 has played in the evolution of the videogame industry. It can be said that it was the first action RPG with truely deep and balanced mechanics, immersed in a very good lore and with some (back in the day, innovative) mechanics which have absolutely determined how role-playing multiplayer games have evolved since then. I played Diablo 2 very actively during my teenager years, and never quite stopped playing it but rather slowly played less and less until my finishing of high school.

Loyal to the series, I started playing Diablo 3 when it was released with my also Diablo passionate girlfriend. Even though the widespread criticism of Diablo 3 at its launch and the time following it, we have always liked the kind of game Diablo 3 presents and have never stopped playing it through its many different eras. The gameplay has changed a lot shortly before its expansion, Reaper of Souls, because of it, and with changes coming after this expansion, becoming a quite different game nowadays. While the current mechanics offer more personality to the game, and having always played in hardcore mode since its release, we truely enjoyed the cruel difficulty the game posed in its earlier versions. I stopped playing Diablo 3 at some point in 2017, coming back for a few months at some point in 2020.

On the topic of criticism to Diablo 3 and comparison with Diablo 2, my opinion is that Diablo 3 presented one clear improvement and one clear deterioration from Diablo 2. The improvement is that Diablo 3 is a much more polished game, with a lot more balance between skills, items, builds and playstyles than Diablo 2; and more streamlined gameplay which makes it much more comfortable to play. However, it lacks some of Diablo 2's personality, being that Diablo 3 mechanics, mostly those revolving around items, are simpler in its possibilities and the amount of thinking the player needs to put in the builds. On top of this, Diablo 3 had the bad luck to be the younger brother, with Diablo 2's fame preceding it and with 15 years of time which people expected to make up for this, and which quite didn't. In my opinion, Diablo 3 is objectively a better game than Diablo 2, but is not up to par considering the amount of time and experience that Blizzard had before releasing it.

My Diablo 3 profile can be checked here

My girlfriend and I started publishing videos showcasing some of our Diablo 3 characters and their builds in action for a short while. Some of them can be found in the following.

Of course, when Diablo 2: Resurrected came out, both me and my partner played it. Overall it felt like an improvement on the original game, despite some unannounced changes. I played it quite a bit through launch, though some of the server issues were particularly annoying. I stopped playing shortly after primarily due to lack of time, but also because the announced patches and changes to the gameplay stroke me as unnecessary and not what was promised from the game. I have not yet played the game after its gameplay updates, but I do intend to do so at some point, and judge carefully whether they are improvements or not.

Dota 2

Having never played a Moba game before Dota 2, and only Heroes of the Storm shortly at any other moment, I started playing Dota 2 rather skeptically, disliking the concept and the kind of communities built around these kind of games. However, over time, I found the game very interesting, much more complex and deep than I initially thought and most of all, incredibly addictive. I currently have over 4000 hours of Dota 2 with over 4000 games over two accounts. I stopped playing it sometime in 2018 (after several attempts of several months without playing), though, since it had become a worrying addiction for me.

While my skill level in Dota 2 is probably not comparable to the one I acquired in other games, specially compared to the rest of the very hardcore community, it is still a very important part of my gamer life and has had many effects on my tastes and thoughts on games.

Dota 2 always felt to me like a great game to play as a team, and a bad game to play casually.

Darkfall Online & Darkfall Unholy Wars

Darkfall Online was a MMORPG with FPS-like combat mechanics, full-loot open world PvP and a huge focus on clan-based mechanics such as clan-owned cities and sieges. It came out in early 2009, which is when I started playing it. Developed by a small greek company with no other known titles, including its own physics, 3D and game logic engine and with a never-ending list of design flaws and crucial mistakes during its whole life (and taking into account it was still a 15€/month game), it is amazing that it lived for as long as it did, even though it overcame a huge redesign and name change which the developers tried to present as a new game in 2013 (becoming Darkfall Unholy Wars). This is no casuality, as anyone who has ever played Darkfall will tell you it can bring the player both the worst and most desperating and exhausting bugs or design mistakes and the most adrenaline-pumping, immersing, and glorious moments of your life.

I played Darkfall on and off for a long period of time (2009-2015, mostly), although for several reasons most of my lifetime playtime is spread between its launch in 2009 and late 2012. During this time of countless 10-hour sessions, I started making PvP videos (following the huge tradition in the Darkfall community). I was a known personality in the game's community (Orolt Lifebringer / Orolt Undeceiver), having organised PvP leagues, ingame banking services, different kinds of events, having been part and having had very close contact with many of the main clan leaders, even when unclanned; and of course participated in the incredibly deep and complex Darkfall politics (also known as forumfall as it mostly happened in its forums rather than ingame).

Darkfall Online has always had one main point of attraction: Full-loot, open world, no instances first-person-shooter-like PvP with friendly fire, always very centred around giving the player and their physical, mental and strategic ability and environment awareness the last word when it comes to the result of PvP. This has allowed Darkfall to be an infinite source of outnumbered fights, both in the 1v2 and 1v3 areas, all the way up to the 30v70 and 20v100 unique but real cases. While Darkfall has always revolved around player skill, it has never done anything to promote what could be called "fair fights", thus making ambushing, baiting and of course, zerging or swarming strategies repeated endlessly, and promoting not only shooter players with insane reflexes but also strategists and most of all, politicians, who have played a very big role in the development of Darkfall and its community.

Another of its most acclaimed aspects is its world-building. Both Darkfall Online and Darkfall Unholy Wars have always featured a big world which never seems to repeat itself, always offering a new kind of mountain, cave, volcano, jungle or monster fortress. This aspect multiplies its importance by a thousand when one comes to realise the collision and physics engine Darkfall offers, with infinite detail and making terrain and its usage an insanely important aspect of the combat, both for small scale PvP (getting your enemies in small passages to make them hit each other) and large scale PvP (placing cannons on a high position with a small passage entrance for sieges, or blocking cave entrances with mounts and vehicles to exacerbate choke points).

However, Darkfall had a very big share of problems, all leading and coming from one main problem: Lack of players. From a horrible start with a never-ending list of bugs, exploits and design flaws which made the game almost unplayable to new introduced mechanics never quite having its intended purpose. More precisely, some of the biggest problems Darkfall always had are making it an appealing game for new and/or casual players, getting enough advertising to build a consistent player base and providing mechanics which incentivate players actually playing the game and making the world alive. On the topic of world-building, besides its incredible artwork and immersion, Darkfall has never had any real content to fill in that world with, providing rather a container where there was often nothing to be done besides run around and look for other people to fight with. If full-loot open world PvP with no rules is not already a big enough source of frustration, Darkfall developers, Aventurine, have offered a great deal of failed mechanics and unclear objectives.

Other games

I am a player who stays with games for a very long period of time, trying to extract everything out of them and understanding their mechanics to exhaustion. However, there is also a wide range of games which I have played for only small fractions of my life in comparison with the ones mentioned but which still have been very influential in my gamer personality and even way of life.

Many of these are what could be called "old" and classical games, as renowned as Doom and Doom 2, and other related games such as Heretic, whose atmosphere also contributed to making me a lover of dark and creepy places. I have recently came back to the Doom and Doom 2 modding environment and found myself rediscovering these games and how well they stand the passage of time. Lemmings is a game which greatly contributed to my desire for making videogames by showing me the possibilities and creativity in the mechanics one can develop. Raptor: Call of shadows, besides providing me with hours of fun and development of my twitch skills, also greatly influenced me in making me the music lover I am today with its magnificent soundtrack. X-COM: UFO Defense is one of the main contestants for my favourite game of all time, and I still replay it every once in a while. Its incredibly complex research, manufacture and exploring system, combined with a combat system which can make you scream in panic, pain and most of all, desperation when things go wrong are something which I will never stop being in love with. I played the more modern iterations of this series, which I did quite like, but felt had lost or over-streamlined some of the complexity in the original game. Specially XCOM 2 felt like it replaced the tension of things potentially slowly going wrong with a more constant feeling of frustration and helplessness with things definitely going wrong. I feel this was a subtle but very noticeable problem with the game.

Even though I have always and continue to be absolutely terrible at it, and that I never played it for a long period of time, Starcraft has also been one of my lovers, both due to its lore and ambience and for its gameplay. I have barely played Starcraft 2 beyond going through its campaign (which was really good), but about the original Starcraft, little can be said about arguably the king of real time strategy games. Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and its expansions are also some of the games I have enjoyed the most in my life, having replayed them more than once. While their gameplay is rather simple and easy in contrast with the kind of games I tend to enjoy, the storyline and ambience make up for it making them a really good ride. At the time of this writing, I am in the process of playing through Half-Life: Alyx, and I am quite liking it, feeling it is only short of having a speechless protagonist from becoming worthy of the name "Half-Life 3". Finally, the greatly acclaimed Portal and Portal 2 games have also entertained my mind for as much time as they were worth, and as many other people, I will always recommend to everyone asking me to play those games as something that needs to be done in life. The only complaint I could make about the Portal series is that they were way too short.