The Mine Where I Worked Out What I Like

Longer session than I meant to have. A girl in Dagsion had lost her hair clip near the mine, the job paid Renown, and I like Renown, so out I went.

Two things happened on the way that were new. I hit my first proper world-map Skirmish, which I had been half-expecting and which turned out to be a perfectly good reason to be walking there. And then I got into Niraga Mine and completely lost track of time.

I did not go and get the clip. I went and got everything. Every side passage, every crate, every chest, all the materials, and eventually a back exit I only found because I had already been down every other corridor. The game marks those — the Uncharted symbol means there is a second way out — and finding it felt like the mine had been built for someone who does what I do.

That was the good half of the evening.

The other half was the fighting, and by about the fourth Clash I noticed I was not really making decisions any more. I was picking the same attacks in the same order and watching the same animations play. So I stopped, and I used Skip to Conclusion, and it won, and I felt vaguely like I had cheated.

I sat with that for a bit, because "I am bored of this" and "I am playing this wrong" feel almost identical from the inside and they lead somewhere very different.

What eventually sorted it out was noticing that the two halves of the evening were not in tension at all. The exploring and the fighting are separate systems asking for separate things, and I am allowed to want one and not the other. I have written the whole argument up properly in the guide below, and the short version is that the skip button is now my default and the chests still all get opened.

I feel noticeably better about the next twenty chapters than I did this morning.

One small thing I also want to keep: the city pickups refresh on a new chapter, not every time the clock moves. I had been walking all of Dagsion far more often than the game wanted me to.