Full Steam Behind: 2022 In The Rear-View Mirror

Everyone seems to be sharing their Steam Replay year-in-review stats so I thought I might as well get in on the act. It's an easy post so why not?

Except I don't seem to have received my annual report. I know Steam knows where I am. I've been getting emails about the sale, reminding me of all the titles on my Wishlist that are going cheap (Although not cheap enough that I've actually bought any.) but of the Replay itself there's been no sign.

Of course, my Steam account is linked to an email address I don't look at very often. But then I shouldn't need to; I have it set to forward everything to one I use every day. And it's working. That's how I'm getting the sales promos. So where's the Replay?

In my Spam folder, where else? Why did it go there? Search me.

To find out what was going on, I logged into the Gmail account I use for Steam. There was my Replay email, sitting at the top of the inbox, right beside all those sales pitches. 

If Gmail was perfectly happy to consider those legit, why, then, with the same software forwarding the same emails to another Gmail account, did the sorting algorithm decide to label one of them as spam? I mean, who did it imagine was sending the damn thing? It's literally Gmail mailing Gmail. Who's the spammer now?

Sometimes I think the real surprise is that any of this stuff works at all. We take it all for granted but as Twitter's recent troubles remind us, the whole internet is really all held together with string and spit.

Anyway, I got the report in the end, along with a couple more things from Square Enix and Flyff that I'd have liked to have seen when they were fresh but which had somehow been forwarded into the spam folder. I suppose the takeaway from all of this is that I should check my spam folder once in a while. Yeah, like that's going to happen...

Looking at the data itself, rather than the delivery method, it feels equally sketchy. There are a number of broken links and blank panels. It seems that during my "longest streak" (A vague concept that might refer to consecutive daily logins but that's a guess) I played seven games, only Steam can't remember what three of them were. Neither can I, although I imagine they were demos from one of the NextFests that have since been removed from the platform.

I was a little surprised at how little I appear to have used Steam in 2022. I would have imagined I'd at least have opened the interface most days although I would frequently just have been using it to look things up or find screenshots I've taken. I use Steam as a source of information as much as a gaming platform. Probably more. 

It makes a bit of a nonsense of the Replay stats as far as I'm concerned. I'd be more interested to know how many times I logged in and what I did while I was there, not just what games I played but I don't imagine facilitating bloggers in the pursuance of their craft is one of Valve's top priorities.

The breakdown of games played by age is interesting, if more than a little misleading. I'm pretty sure the heavy bias towards new releases is another by-product of my regular attendance at Steam's frequent NextFests. 

I really like demos. In many - quite possibly most - cases a thirty-to-sixty minute demo is about as much of a game as I'm likely to need or want. There's evidence to support that thesis in the form of all the games on my wishlist that found their way there on the back of demos and now linger fretfully, awaiting a purchase that will almost certainly never come. 

As I've already mentioned, even hefty discounts are rarely enough to tempt me to hit "Buy". When I do occasionally succumb, as the statistics prove, the results aren't pretty.

Exhibit A: My Time At Sandrock. I bought this as soon as it flagged up as available in an Early Access build. Since then, I've played it nine times, most of those in the first month. 

Although there were plenty of complaints about the inevitably buggy and incomplete nature of the game in Early Access, none of that had anything to do with my fast-fading interest. It played perfectly acceptably for me - I just found it a bit dull. I haven't really thought much about it since last May.

A similarly unsuccessful purchase, Sable, didn't even make it into the highlights.  Hardly surprising when a click-through reveals I've notched up just two sessions there. It represents a rounding error in terms of playtime at <1%. 

By far my most played titles on Steam, at least in terms of hours logged, were mmorpgs. Three of them account for well over half of all the time I spent "playing " games on Steam in 2022.

I am quite surprised to see New World accounting for sixty sessions. I knew I'd played a fair bit in the autumn, when the big update dropped, but I'd forgotten I also played for a good while in the spring. 40% of my time spent in Aeternum this year came in March, April and May.

Immediately before that I'd been heavily into Lost Ark, apparently. 80% of my time there was crammed into one month, February, with the remaining twenty per cent trailing along in March. We were all playing Lost Ark back then, of course. Is anyone still?

The spider-web graphic purporting to show where I spent most of my time this year is misleading. Not that it's any fault of Steam. It can only tally the games I play through its services, after all.

In a wider context, I certainly played  more Point & Click Adventure Games than anything other than mmorpgs this year but I played almost all of them on Prime Gaming. Maybe Amazon would like to send me a similar breakdown. Or not.

I'm not sure what Steam is counting as a "Life Sim". I wasn't aware I'd played any. Maybe My Time At Sandrock counts? As for "Building", the only game where I did much of that was Chimeraland. I did log into Valheim five times but all the building I did there was in 2021. Still, I suppose it just counts tags, not actual in-game activity. I mean, how would it know? Don't answer that.

Finally, there are the comparisons with other Steam users. As everyone else has noticed, most Steam users barely seem to trouble the statisticians at all. The average Steamer (Is that what we're calling ourselves?) plays just five games in a calendar year and barely manages to log in for much more than a week at a stretch.

I doubled the average for streaks and tripled it for both games played and achievements... erm, achieved. I think that definitely says more about the general level of engagement with the platform or, I should say, lack of it, than any particular enthusiasm on my side. 

It took me a long time to come around to Steam but I do now think of it generally as a Good Thing. Even so, it's a long way from being my primary interface with the games I play, the majority of which I fire up from their own proprietary launchers. 

Many of those I could play via Steam. I just choose not to. It's one extra layer of beaurocracy to climb over before I get to play the games themselves. The stats are nice, though. I'll give them that.

Gallic Shrug

This morning Tobold posted something about his Steam library and how many unplayed games there are in it. It's one of those blogging perennials that come up now and then, here and there, predictable and ineradicable as weeds.

Time was when I could indulge myself with a smug, hipsterish drive-by, something along the lines of "Not a problem I recognize. I don't even use Steam". Yeah, those days are long gone. I've had to find other ways to annoy people. 

I'm not sure when I got myself a Steam account or when I started using it regularly, although I do know the latter came a good while after the former. I use it most days now. I've succumbed, slowly, at first reluctantly then later with some small enthusiasm, to its much-vaunted convenience. 

I'd still generally prefer to have games in standalone launchers on my desktop. It seems quicker and easier to me. Since Steam lets me launch individual games from my library from their desktop shortcuts, though, that's something of a moot point.

I only asked for the bill!

 

What is undoubtedly easier is buying games through Steam. It saves having to make new accounts, fill out new forms and come up with new user IDs and passwords. For that reason alone, if there's a straight choice between buying a game direct and buying it via Steam I tend to go through Valve's portal.

For all that, I don't yet think of myself as a Steam person. And neither does Steam. That was made objectively clear to me this morning when I tried to use the Steam Calculator Tobold linked to find out what my Steam stats might be. 

The calculator offers more than a dozen ways you can identify yourself, none of which meant anything to me. Never mind all that: "Just sign in via Steam and we'll do it for you." Yeah, no you won't. Apparently having a valid, recognized, working account isn't enough. You have to have a Profile too. 

I don't have one and I wasn't planning on getting one. I suppose I could have filled out the necessary paperwork but since avoiding paperwork is the primary reason I use Steam in the first place that didn't really appeal. Instead, I thought I'd do it the old-fashioned way. Just look at my Library and count the games.

Damp dufflecoats, patchouli and despair?

I can see why Tobold didn't do that. He has 445 of them. I have a nice, round fifty. I can almost see them all without scrolling down. 

Of those fifty there are just two that I've never played at all: Mixed Messages and Age of Wonders III. They were both free. The first I got because at one time a lot of people were blogging about it and I thought I might too but I never got around to it. The second looked like the kind of game people often blog about so... you get the picture.

Of the remaining forty-eight, I have finished twenty. I know! Surprised me, too. Although some of them are very short. 

Fourteen more are mmorpgs, meaning they can't be finished. I'm still playing all of those, at least for some value of "playing". I'm never not playing any mmorpg I have ever played unless it's actually closed down. Just not playing it at the moment. 

We're in France. It's not like it doesn't happen.

Come to think of it I think three of those mmos (Stash, Dragon Nest Europe and Bless Online) have closed down. I should probably uninstall those.

That leaves fourteen. Five of those I am still planning on finishing some day (Yonder, Tanzia, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Kingdoms of Amalur, My Time At Portia), one is Valheim, of which no more need be said, and one is Broken Sword 5, about which this post was originally meant to be and still will be when I get there.

The residue are demos plus one game I tried and instantly disliked but never got around to uninstalling. That one's called What Never Was, appropriately.

How much the whole lot might be worth I can't say, neither what I paid for them, nor the market value, high or low. I can say that of fifty titles I paid some amount of money for eighteen of them. Two others (Rift and Project: Gorgon) I paid someone else money for then linked them to Steam. I'd be very surprised if I've paid more than a couple of hundred pounds for the lot although I did probably buy more than half of them in sales.

Trust me, I'm not a doctor.

Of all the unplayed (or underplayed) titles, Broken Sword 5 stands out. It was a birthday present that I asked for many years ago, suggesting I was, at least at the time, pretty keen on playing it. More to the point, it was the reason I signed up for a Steam account in the first place. You can't play it without one, even if you have the thing on DVD. Which I do.

Bearing that in mind, I thought maybe I should have another crack at it. The last time I tried I got stuck and since I didn't want to use a walkthrough I took a break hoping inspiration would strike. It didn't.

Not so much an achievement as an essential plot point.

Or at least that's how I remember it. I even remember roughly where and how I was stuck. Steam doesn't. When I went to log in and restore my most recent save there wasn't one. Instead I had the choice of starting a New Game at the Tutorial, at Chapter 1 or at Chapter 2. 

Hmm. Maybe I was at Chapter 2. Don't remember it that way but if I hadn't already finished Chapter 1, why would it even give me the option?

So I tried that and got a cut scene and a voiceover full of plot points that very definitely must have happened further on in the narrative than I ever reached. To avoid spoilers I quit out of that and tried Chapter 1 instead. It seemed... completely and utterly new. Not a single thing there that I recognized, other than George and Nico. 

Ah, but who cares? It was gorgeous to look at at and fun to play. The dialog was witty and amusing, the plot was intriguing, the puzzles were exactly the right difficulty so I kept going. It didn't seem to match anything about my memories of the previous times I'd played but what the hell. 

You can't beat a good joke about les évènements, that's what I always say.

I played for an hour and a half until I reached a convenient stopping point and then I stopped. I'd gotten a few achievements so I looked at those to see how many other people had managed them. 

It would appear a lot of people give up on the game right at the start because two of the achievements were for discoveries material to the plot and only sixty per cent of players have those. Pretty sure you can't get any further if you don't. Then again, maybe the rest just skip straight to Chapter 2 since apparently that's allowed.

Then I noticed I had another achievement. It was for completing the tutorial. I did that in October 2016. Maybe that's what I vaguely remember although since I also remember not being able to finish whatever it was I was doing that doesn't feel like it could be right.

Learned how, yes. Played the game, no.

Only just under thirty per cent of players get that achievement, suggesting most people skip the tutorial. Seems fair enough. By the time you get to the fifth game in a series you've probably figured out how to play.

We'll see how far I get this time. I do want to find out what happens although the mystery that really interest me isn't so much who stole the painting and why as what happened to my saves and the game I thought I was playing.

I imagine it'll all come clear in the end. Maybe I'll do the tutorial again and see if there are any clues there. I could probably use all the help I can get.

Gotta Get My Disco Shoes On

In my reply to a long and thoughtful comment Seanas left on my first impressions post, I observed that one of the things I found most surprising about Disco Elysium in early play was just how much of a "game" it was. In ludic entertainments predicated on narrative and atmosphere, I'm used to the mechanics taking a back seat to almost everything else. There can be a few quirky tricks to pick up at the start but with those down it's full ahead on plot, puzzles and storyline.

But then, Disco Elysium does claim to be an rpg. And not just any rpg. As the publisher's blurb on the Steam store has it, "the most faithful representation of desktop role playing ever attempted in video games". Yes, well, that may be so. I'm only eight hours in and anyway I wouldn't pretend to have played enough crpgs to make a judgment. Nor "desktop" for that matter.

What I have noticed is the way the game employs some very traditional rpg gameplay levers like levels and xp and stats. It feels odd, playing something that in many ways feels like a souped-up version of the Blackwell Chronicles, fed by the same ostensible purpose of solving murders and mysteries, yet at the same time seeing your character progress in much the same way they would in an mmorpg.

Once you have a player character with levels and stats that increase over time, operating in a world where the capabilities of the non-player characters don't change, the possibility of gaming the gameworld immediately presents itself. It's expected. The game itself prompts you to return to certain challenges you may have failed once you've levelled up and spent some skill points.

As Seanas points out, it's even possible to become stuck after failing a check and not be able to proceed until you've leveled up sufficiently to go back and beat it. Just like outlevelling a difficult boss you couldn't beat then coming back to kick his ass.

Since this isn't an mmorpg you have, again as Seanas mentions, you have the option of saving before you try something, then re-loading if you don't get the result you want. It's a common practice with many genres but also something I've stated on numerous occasions I don't like to do. I will do it, naturally, because better that than becoming frustrated and blocked, but saving at any other point than the end of a session significantly diminishes my involvement with a game.

So far, in eight hours of play, I have only had to re-load once and that was when I mis-clicked a conversation option. The way dialog interaction is presented in Disco Elysium leaves the player prone to this kind of error. Sometimes there are what seem like anything up to a dozen lines of text, closely spaced. The options already taken often remain on screen in a dulled shade of the default dialog text color, a reddish-orange which, set against a brownish-black backdrop, is already indistinct.

 

If you happen to have a tendency, as I do, towards occasional, involuntary muscle spasms, brought about by playing long gaming sessions with your mouse-hand unconsciously tensed, it's all too easy to find you've accidentally made your character say something other than what you intended. I'd guess it happens to me once or twice most sessions.

In this case I twitch-clicked the option that made my character ask the barkeeper for a drink. Since I'm planning on keeping him drink and drug free for the duration of the game, that was kind of a deal-breaker. I tried to get out of the interaction but even going to the Options menu didn't shift the conversation back to the previous stage. In the end I had to reload the last autosave, giving me about fifteen minutes of gameplay to repeat.

Even with that hazard in mind I still haven't begun saving before decision points. I can feel the game constricting around me and I may well become trapped but if it happens I'll have learned something important about the design. Better that than break my own fourth wall.

Another thing I haven't yet done is to read a walkthrough or even check if any exist. It's possible the extreme variability of the narrative structure might make traditional guides non-viable, I suppose, although I doubt it.

Eight hours gameplay without needing an out-of-game hint is unusual. It speaks well of the much-vaunted freedom of action although it also has a lot to do with the sheer volume of text there I've had to read. I'd like to avoid walkthroughs for as long as I can. I'm considerably more sanguine about taking advice from guides than I am about save-scumming but I'd still prefer to keep it to a minimum so I'm happy not to have needed to check Google just yet.

There are other, arguably more organic, means of manipulating the dice. (And Disco Elysium does in fact have dice. Each skill check is a roll of two D6 and it happens on screen. You can literally see what you rolled. I can't remember the last time I played a game where that happened. It's another design choice that emphasizes the undeniable truth: you're playing a game). One of them is the aforementioned use of skill points to tweak stats. The other is gear.

 

Disco Elysium uses a gear-based progression system. This is something that seemed so out of context it took me a couple of sessions even to notice. Every so often you get the opportunity to acquire clothing and items which your character can equip and those items have stats just like they would in World of Warcraft or EverQuest.

Okay, not exactly like that. Most of the ones I've seen have just one or two stats. They modify specific skills by a point or two, enough to be significant in the context of the game. They can also modify stats both ways, up and down but, unlike in most rpgs, in Disco Elysium there could be good reasons why you'd want to lower a stat instead of raising it. You can become too skilled for your own good, leading to obsessive behavior and social disadvantage. Or so I read in the tool tips. None of my skills are in any danger of back-firing just yet.

It took a while for it occur to me but the penny finally dropped as I was checking the list of skill checks I'd failed and which the game was prompting me to retry. Just as in EverQuest twenty years ago you might have taken your fire-resist gear out of the bank for a Naggy raid or swapped your sword for a charisma-boosting Stein of Moggok before trading with an impressionable NPC shopkeeper, so in Disco Elysium you might want to slip on your green snakeskin shoes for the boost they give to your Composure skill.

It's an extraordinarily artificial, gamelike concept to find embedded in an existential meditation like Disco Elysium but someone has made an heroic attempt to maintain at least some kind of tenuous link between the object and its supposed psychological or physical effects. Each item comes with a short description that's more than basic flavor text.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century we're long past the simple days of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, when the framework for what would become "roleplaying games" was being cobbled roughly together by intense young men in unfashionable clothing. (I'm guessing it was mostly men but I think I'm pretty safe on their fashion sense, either way).

Those were the days when what we've come to know as "stats" were genuine outcroppings of material properties (adamantium or mithril being understandably better-suited to provide protection from assault than cloth or linen) or sympathetic magic (the skin of an ogre or a giant, fashioned into gloves or a belt, affording the wearer the proportionate strength of the original owner, for example). 

Many rpgs, mmo or otherwise, still pay lip-service to these connections when it suits but a glance at the menu of statistics attached to almost any piece of armor in most of the games we play suggests the primary source for all of them is a spreadsheet. No-one pretends there's even a magical handwaving explanation for how your fancy hat improves your chance of landing a critical hit with a greatsword that looks like an ironing-board, let alone how your ornate leg-armor adds to your intelligence.

In Disco Elysium someone has done their damnedest to force these statistics into some kind of meaningful harness. Take those shoes I mentioned: wearing them adds to your Composure but detracts from your Savoir Faire and the game tells you just why that is. 

The "awesome watchtower heels" are what makes you more composed, something that actually makes sense when you read the in-game description of the Composure skill. It specifically states "You'll rock that disco outfit a lot more if you don't slouch". Crazy, perhaps, but undeniably consistent. Conversely, the skill description for Savoir Faire emphasizes athleticism and acrobatics. It seems entirely resonable that you'd be less light on your feet in a pair of winklepickers that pinch. 

It's a brave attempt at rationalizing the irrational but, because this is very much a game, the result is inevitable. You roam the city with your entire wardrobe stuffed into an invisible suitcase (as usual, no attempt has been made to explain how you carry all this stuff), blithely casting off your white satin shirt in the middle of the street (in a snowstorm, likely as not) to change into a stained muscle-vest because, apparently, wearing a dress shirt helps you Conceptualize postmodernist architecture, while wearing a tank top helps you punch people in the face.

The bizarre thing is you can see how that makes some kind of twisted sense. These items and their
statistically linked concepts have metaphorical connections that aren't hard to parse. The problem comes in the functionality. I strongly suspect that any imagined benefit to Savoir Faire that might be gained by removing a tight-fitting pair of shoes would pretty quickly dissipate when you found yourself standing in your socks in an ice-puddle.

All of which returns me to my original contention: that Disco Elysium is a very gamey game. The question is, does that add to its allure or tarnish it? And I'm not sure, not yet. I'm still struggling to wrap my perceptions around the concepts. It's taken me a surprisingly long time to realize what and where the controls are. Now I'm concentrating on figuring out how they work. Normally this is the sort of thing you'd get past in the tutorial but I'm hip-deep in plot. I wasn't expecting to have to work the the controls so dilligently just to solve the puzzles and enjoy the patter.

If nothing else, it's certainly made me think afresh about how rpgs work. There was a time when I did a lot of that but constant exposure has eroded my curiosity. I can at least thank Disco Elysium for that. Whether my awakened awareness is going to enhance or abrade my enjoyment of less ambitious entries in the canon remains to be seen.

One thing's for sure. I'll be giving the next person who complains about dodgy itemization in mmorpgs short shrift. Try balancing two dozen stats and coming up with a unique explanation for how they work, on every single item. Then again, according to the Steam store description there are only ninety-four equippable items in the entire game...

I'll get my coat. (It's a Disco Ass Blazer. +1 Esprit de Corps: halogen watermarks). Smooth!