Dishonored and Diablo 3: Breaking OCD.

I don't have great internet. Said internet comes with an almost hilariously low monthly bandwidth limit. It makes downloading games a major thing, and it's one of many reasons I went with a PS4 over the Xbone. I don't have the bandwidth for the One's massive patches/updates. I'll never be able to download a full, retail game on the PS4, though. 30+GB are well beyond the range I can manage. At 150 gigs a month, it wouldn't take long to go over. My download speeds are also not large enough to pull down files quickly, especially over wifi. Thus, sometimes I have to make a decision. Do I delete a game knowing that I'll probably never come back to it, or do I leave it festering on my system, mocking me?

In the case of Dishonored, I chose the high ground. Dunwall City Trials is a DLC made by someone who hated their job, their player base, and fun itself. It has 10 achievements associated with it and after multiple attempts at playing some of the levels, I deleted the base game and all DLC. I abandoned it at 71/80 achievements. Dunwall City Trials might not be impossible, but it certainly is trying to be.

I wrote up the list of Street Fighter achievements despite not beating that game, and while I may yet do that for the two games mentioned in the topic of this post, it won't be until I stop being aggravated at having to give them up. At a point, the OCD that drives me to do this is overpowered by frustration and stress. Even knowing the unfinished games will be a scar on my streak of perfected games, I couldn't do it anymore. It nags at me every day, and I just have to try and ignore it. I cannot go back to that abomination of gaming. Dunwall City Trials taints the entire experience, one that I thought the Daud DLCs already were doing a fine job of on their own. I know a lot of people really loved Daud's two campaigns. I did not. The levels were sloppily designed, the powers were terrible and didn't feel right in comparison to Corvo's, and the achievements were neither difficult nor all that time consuming.

I perfected Dishonored's base game, which I still feel is an excellent piece on its own. Unfortunately, it's a case where a game's DLC completely ruins the package as a whole. I would never recommend Dishonored to anyone, especially if they want to get all of its achievements/trophies. That is a fool's errand, and it's one that only a tiny handful of people would ever be able to do.

As for Diablo 3? I just don't have the desire to grind all six classes to level 70. That's really all there is to that one. Knowing how unbelievably long that takes, and knowing I'd have to go it even slower on my Hardcore character (ie, playing on Normal without the boosted XP gain) absolutely destroyed my desire to return to it. Once I put Ultra SF4 back in, that was the nail on Diablo's coffin. It's not a horrible game - it was when it launched for the PC, but the UEE incarnation is perfectly fine. Just not if you want to grind out achievements. Doubly so if you have other games you're working on. An hour of playing will not get you much progress at all. I may go back to it from time to time, as I have this one on disc, so it's a simple matter of reinstalling, but it won't be any time soon.

For Diablo, I don't think I even need to write an achievement review. It doesn't really have difficult achievements. The only one that requires skill/patience is getting a 50-item callout. And that's mostly down to luck more than anything. The rest of the achievements are either progress-based or simply require you to play for 100 hours. I don't have that kind of time and I literally have all the time in the world to play these games. If you expect me to stick with your game for more than 20-30 hours, you'd better be packing gameplay worth the investment. Diablo 3, at least on last-gen consoles, does not. Were they still being updated like the current-gen systems were... maybe. Maybe.

Right now, I'm working on finishing up Lego Marvel. I jumped from 500/1000 points to 630/1000 in one session. It's mostly replaying stages in Free Mode, doing Open World Cleanup, and collecting characters. 13 achievements + the Platinum remain. Lego Marvel's one of those weird games, like Dark Souls 2, where the Xbox version has a 'you got all other achievements' thing. It's a Platinum achievement. After that, I need to return to Eternal Sonata. That game has very few achievements, but the ones it has require commitment. And a NG+ playthrough. And multiple guides because holy god.

On the PS4 front, sadly, things aren't going much better.

I got my PS4 about two weeks back, give or take. I bought Evil Within on release. Annnnd boy, was that a mistake. Absurd letterboxing, trial-and-error gameplay with infrequent checkpointing, expecting you to know what to do in any given situation without explaining a god damn thing, horrendous boss battles, areas that exist for literally no other reason than to make you burn down stored-up ammo, short levels that feel ten times longer than they are due to how many times you'll die while playing them... it's genuinely one of the worst games I've ever made the mistake of purchasing.

Akumu Mode, which is the toughest thing to do in the game, might be what causes me to abandon the Platinum for the game. I'm not happy that the first retail game I've bought for the system (I grabbed PS4 Minecraft just to have something to play that didn't make me want to strangle someone...) is most likely going to go uncompleted. But I don't think there's anything I can do about it, unless NG+ lets you up the difficulty. If you can go in with a fully-upgraded arsenal, then it might be tolerable. But it's a mode where everything, including environmental objects, are a one-hit kill. One-hit kills in a game with a 30-second load time are insufferable. If I do struggle through it, I'm going to keep a kill counter and notes on what struck me down each time. Maybe write down how long each chapter takes me. Things like that.

Looking forward, as far as PS4 games go, I plan to grab Akiba's Trip, Shadow of Mordor, Costume Quest 2, and Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. As far as 360 titles go, I have no idea. I plan to grab Bayonetta 2 at some point, but it's a Platinum game and I don't want to bust the WiiU's expensive, clunky, terrible gamepad, so I'm not going to try for whatever counts as 100% in that game. Impossible entities do not 'count' as far as my OCD is concerned.

I wish I had seen Dishonored as an impossible, because that's what it turned out to be. It's aggravating, it's maddening, but there's little I can do about it. I thought about downloading Darksiders 2, as I rented that when it released, but I know exactly how long and dull it is. I don't think I need that in my life. As of this writing, the Dragon Age games are on sale. I've always been interested in the series, but I've never played either of them. ...Downside is the first game has scummy DLC practices. ...It also has a ton of DLC. My problem with them is that some only have two achievements, and they seem progression-based. In other words, the only reason they exist is to force completionists and OCD idiots like me into buying them to keep their score from being incomplete.

That's fucking gross, boys and girls.

Plus it's cheaper to buy the Ultimate Edition of Origins on Amazon than it is to grab the game+DLC on Xbox Marketplace, even with discounts. DA2 is more expensive on Amazon, but the bandwidth required for both games basically means they're absolutely not downloadable titles for me.

I've been putting off writing this post, because it'd just mean having to admit and accept that I've given up. I don't like doing that. I don't think anyone who's played Dunwall City Trials would laugh at my giving up, as I'm sure that DLC can't be perfected by most average players. But it won't stop me from being hard on myself for giving up. One of the reasons my brain latched onto this was that I was doing it to keep myself from giving up. I wasn't going to quit playing, no matter how bad or difficult a game was!

But reality and what I'd envisioned are two very different things, sadly. Up until now, nothing's been able to slow my progress down. Dishonored did, and it was a serious blow to my morale. It's something that's had me feeling down and not wanting to get anything done. But Evil Within is staring me down, and I have incomplete titles still on my 360. After a year of suspending play in the 360 version of Minecraft, I went back in and got the two achievements I'd been lacking, then started on Lego Marvel again.

Getting so many achievements in one day has rekindled my fire a bit, but I don't know if it will be fully relit until at least Isaac. That one I know I'll go at full force, and it'll probably suspend my playing of anything else on the system until I'm done. For now, I'll take what I can get. Sometimes you only need a little push to get yourself going. Achievement hunting, as all things, requires motivation. Or are least stubbornness. For awhile, I had neither.