Final Fantasy XV is on Xbox Game Pass for PC. I downloaded it, which took quite a long time. Then I started playing it. Then I found out that it doesn't have "Final Fantasy" type combat, but is an action RPG. Then I uninstalled it. End of story.

There is a saying that "To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.". When creating a campaign for Dungeons & Dragons, most DMs borrow ideas from one or several sources. I once played in a homebrew The Witcher D&D campaign, and when I recently watched The Witcher on Netflix, one of the episodes was pretty much the one adventure we played in that campaign. Apparently both that campaign and Netflix based it on the same short story.

I presented my idea to build a campaign together to my players, and they suggested a nautical / aquatic campaign. That immediately solved the question of what material I could steal: WotC has last year published Ghosts of Saltmarsh, a nautical campaign setting and adventure collection. And I actually bought the Sinister Silver Edition from Beadle & Grimm's. And I participated in two Kickstarter campaigns, one called Depths of Savage Atoll for .stl files for aquatic / nautical / pirate themed adventures, and another called Sea King's Malice, a 5E adventure with the same theme.

In the early days of the internet, TSR, the company that had created Dungeons & Dragons, was known for going after people who published self-made D&D stuff on Usenet. That was never a good idea. After WotC bought TSR in 1997, they changed that policy, and in 2000 came out with the Open Game License for 3rd edition D&D. 5th edition has its own OGL. Third parties can take the System Reference Document SRD of 5th edition and publish stuff compatible with that, and as the SRD is just 5E without the copyrighted names, the third party product will thus be compatible with 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. On DriveThruRPG and their sub-site Dungeon Masters Guild you can now find thousands of 5E compatible adventures and source books. On DMsguild there is even a "storyline" search term, where you can find all the materials related to a specific WotC book, like Ghosts of Saltmarsh (as the time of writing this, there are 100 adventures related to Ghosts of Saltmarsh there). I might actually already own some of them, as I tend to buy Humble Bundles of 5E adventures on the cheap.

In short, I am pretty confident that I can create a good nautical campaign for my players. The ideas I'll end up using might not all be original, but as long as they are new to my players, that doesn't really matter. In the next session I'll ask them some more questions about how they imagine the campaign. Do they want to be heroic adventures battling evil (which is what Ghosts of Saltmarsh assumes) or rather a group of pirates looking for power and riches (which is what I suspect they'll prefer)? Just like this Ghosts of Saltmarsh playthrough from How to be a great Game Master, I suspect the final result will be substantially different from the source book. Good DMs borrow, great DMs steal, but the final result will be somehow our own.

I never considered myself as a leftist. I am in favor of things like capitalism (with some restraints imposed by the state) and globalisation. In my youth that sort of opinion was about center right. Today some people make it sound as if globalisation is a left-wing idea, especially where it concerns the freedom of movement of people. As I am not living and working in my country of birth, I am very much in favor of freedom of movement. There is a wealth of data that proves that in the majority of cases freedom of movement is beneficial for both the person moving, and the country he is moving to.

Having said that, I also understand why some people are afraid of unrestricted freedom of movement. And the failure of the powers that be over the last decades to properly manage that fear to me is the source for the end of the globalisation consensus. In all the countries where far right populists have come to power, the promise "keeping foreigners out" was always a big part of their success.

The problem with that promise is that everybody is a foreigner in most of the world. Most people quite like *their* freedom of movement. So you get British pensioners in Spain cheering on Brexit, with its recently announced point-based immigration system; without thinking that if Spain decided to implement *exactly* the same system, they wouldn't qualify to stay in Spain. Something like that is rather likely to happen over the coming years, and I don't think the Brexit-leaning British newspapers will say "oh, that's only fair!". No, they will be outraged how Europe would dare to treat Britain that way, even if it was just tit for tat.

5th edition Dungeons & Dragons is the most successful pen & paper roleplaying product ever. It not just reclaimed the crown it had lost to Pathfinder in 4E, but managed to outsell even the previous successful editions of the game. The recently announced Explorer's Guide to Wildemount went up to the #1 sales spot on Amazon for all books before it was even released. And this being the book about the campaign setting for Critical Role confirms something we already knew: Critical Role and similar productions of videos showing people playing Dungeons & Dragons are playing a significant role in the current success of D&D. It is so much easier to demonstrate how D&D is played than it is to explain, so D&D profits very much from the current video dominance on social media.

Not everybody is happy about that. There is talk about the Matt Mercer effect, with new players complaining that their DM isn't doing things like they saw on the videos. It is easy to see how the average DM would have trouble doing things like voice acting as good as, well, a professional voice actor. And the released videos are obviously edited, so they don't show the boring stuff. But is that all there is?

I am currently reading Ghosts of Saltmarsh, a setting and collection of adventures published last year by Wizards of the Coast. This contains 7 adventures, originally published from 1981 to 2005. And when I read some of the older stuff, I can't help thinking that this would be unplayable today. The first adventure, from 1981, the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh [*SPOILER WARNING*] has 30 locations, of which only a handful actually advance the story. You could easily cut out 20 of the 30 locations, and get a better adventure. Some seems to be either pure filler, or designed to frustrate the players, like the glint of coins at the bottom of the well turning out to be 14 silver pieces, protected by poisonous snakes.

Dungeons & Dragons was first released in 1974, and I have been playing it for over 40 years. But as we didn't have videos showing us how D&D was supposed to be played, we all had to improvise. And some of the results were simply garbage, even if nostalgia has resulted in some people not realizing that. Teenage DMs who relied on just the books and some word of mouth to tell them how to run a campaign is not a surefire path to best quality, even if most people at the time still had fun. But then, there wasn't much competition in the form of roleplaying video games around at the time either.

It is clear, that to produce a D&D video for publication to a wide audience, a play style that concentrates on the story, the action, and the fun stuff, and cuts out the tediousness of searching rooms that don't contain anything of interest is preferable. But isn't the same true for everybody's home D&D campaign too? Especially as we get older and don't get together quite as often anymore to play as we did when we were teenagers, maybe we can just cut out the crap, and play a bit more like the "internet celebrity DMs".

After not being all that happy with Phoenix Point, I wanted to try a different turn-based tactical shooter game. So I started playing Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. This is not exactly the same genre: There is a lot less of the strategic level gameplay, there is just a base in which you use various currencies to upgrade your soldiers. And instead of having randomly generated soldiers, you get a very limited number of characters, which will revive at the end of a combat, unless you selected the permadeath option. I don't what happens if you choose the permadeath option, because it seems to me that the characters are essential to the story, maybe its just game over. The option didn't look like something I wanted to try.

Unlike XCom or Phoenix Point, Mutant Year Zero is also a lot more about sneaking. Fortunately, the game very clearly tells you that. It is much better to first walk around the enemy camp, watch their patrol movements, and then pick off stragglers in a single round of combat with silenced weapons. If you can do that, combat ends, and when you start the main fight, there is an enemy less. There are fights where you can do that repeatedly, until the boss mob is all alone, which makes fighting that one a lot easier.

The characters in Mutant Year Zero are not only interesting, they also have different skill trees, a.k.a. mutations. The boar is more of a tank, while the duck is more of a sniper, for example. As your squad is never bigger than 3 characters (when you get a 4th, you need to choose who to take), turns in combat are faster than in the other games. Another notable difference is that all the battles are set, there are no random maps with random enemies. On the downside that turns enemies into a resource with limited supply: You can't just go and do a couple more fights against lower level enemies if you want to level up. It also means that there is less replayability.

However, I would say that for one playthrough, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a lot more fun than Phoenix Point. It is better written, funnier, more balanced, more interesting to play, and a lot less buggy and frustrating. Recommended!

Last year in the D&D community there was a lot of talk about how great an idea a "session zero" was, a session at the start of a campaign in which no actual gameplay would take place, but characters were created, and expectations for the campaign discussed, to get everybody on the same page. Now I was planning what campaign to play next with my more active group, I ended up expanding on that concept.

I have been playing a lot of published campaigns since the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons came out. There are a lot of them, and some are quite interesting, although not all of them are ultimately great. In previous editions, and playing with a group that wasn't all that interested in overarching grand stories, I had some campaigns that were what I would call "episodic", with the group being travelling adventurers, wandering into all sorts of places with smaller stories. Comparing the two, I figured out that the overarching story of a campaign setting wasn't all that difficult to invent yourself.

However, I had also played several self-made campaigns of other Dungeon Masters, and was quite aware of a typical pitfall: The DM spends so much time preparing a game world, that during the game sessions he ends up doing hours of exposition; the players meanwhile fall asleep, and would much rather roll some dice. I left one campaign after not getting the opportunity to roll dice even once in two sessions. That isn't my style of D&D (but I'm not saying that you are playing it wrong if you and your group like it that way).

So I came up with a new concept, the "make your own campaign" offer to my players. We would do a session zero in which we would not only discuss the usual stuff, but also the campaign setting and the overall story arch. Just like the blurb text on the back of a published D&D book, a campaign can often be described in a sentence or two. "A group of adventurers searches the jungle of Chult for a cure for the death curse." Usually the players are aware of at least that much information about the campaign anyway. So why shouldn't they take part in creating it?

The dirty secret of D&D writing is, that it tends to be not very original. If you give me a phrase describing a campaign, like "the group is trying to assemble an artefact in 7 parts to overcome an evil wizard", I can write you a series of adventures that go with that, and that aren't any worse than a typical published D&D book. It isn't that hard. And it is extremely flexible to accommodate various wishes from the players. Some groups like more investigative adventures in a city setting, others prefer dungeon crawls. Asking them what they want, and what they dislike, gives me a series of elements that are more than enough to create a custom-made campaign with.

The advantage is that at this point you can also ask a bunch of meta questions, like how long the campaign should be, or from which level to which level it should go. These parameters are very much predetermined if you play a published campaign, but if you write the campaign yourself, you can make it fit player expectations much better. Of course none of this guarantees a great campaign, but it sure should help.

The comment of Random_Phobosis on my previous post probably necessitates a whole blog post. Random_Phobosis says that if you lose a game, it is the developers' way of telling you that you are playing it wrong. And there are so many levels on which I disagree with that statement. What the fuck does "playing it wrong" even mean?

"Playing", by definition, is doing something for fun. Having fun playing is important, winning however isn't. "Winning" is a completely different concept, more at home in the domain of sports and competition than in the domain of games and playing. Now for some forms of play, competition might still be an important part. But that necessitates certain conditions of balance and fairness, which is why Pay2Win tends to upset people. In most single-player games, the conditions of balance and fairness are not given. Basically AI is underdeveloped in most games, and then some sort of pseudo-balance is simulated by the computer cheating, or play just being completely asymmetrical. That can lead to a form of pseudo-competition, where winning depends on doing exactly what the developers arbitrarily scripted, regardless of whether that makes any sense.

Playing a game exactly like the developers intended is not necessarily the most fun. I remember a lot of fun I had in World of Warcraft when I had a new character on a new server making money by sneaking into far too high level zones and fishing. And sometimes, playing a game like the developers intended feels "wrong". I mentioned Valkyria Chronicles on this blog, where actually fighting a battle using all your units gives you a less good reward than abusing a single scout to bypass the battle. Or Phoenix Point, where accepting every opportunity of battle, e.g. scavenging missions, strengthens the aliens more than your team, making you lose the strategic game. It is pretty safe to assume that an average player who picks up a game like Valkyria Chronicles or Phoenix Point does so because he would like to play tactical battles. The idea that to win on the strategic level you need to avoid those tactical battles is counter-intuitive. Under the very narrow definition that "playing it wrong" means playing it in exactly the way that the developers want you to play, as weird as that might be, the typical player will automatically play certain games wrong. He would need to get information from other sources, like forums or Reddit or YouTube, that tells him what "playing it right" means under this narrow definition.

Me, I don't call that "playing it wrong", I call that "designed badly". Ideally a game should be playable intuitively. If for some specific reason something less intuitive is required of the player, the game should make that very clear to him. A game design in which the intuitive way to play is designed to lead the player astray, and the "right" way to play needs a lot of trial and error, or outside information, is just not a good game.

On the other side, I have played some very good games, which could be completed by playing them in the most obvious way, but also offered you the possibility to play them in more complicated and different ways, e.g. sneaking past enemies instead of killing them, and the game would still work. That is good game design. The more options work, the better. The people who like to optimize and discuss the very best strategy on the internet can still do so, but that one "secret optimal strategy" shouldn't be the only way you can achieve a positive ending in a game. Having to follow an invisible series of steps and being punished for not knowing those steps isn't fun, except for a bunch of masochist gamers. Being able to try different things and see how they all work in slightly different ways, without being punished for it, is fun.

I finished a campaign for the first time in Phoenix Point yesterday. And then I immediately uninstalled the game, because the overall experience was so frustrating. On the easiest difficulty and having used some cheats, I barely made it through the final fight, as the aliens had infinite respawns, and I only had limited ammunition. This is not a game you can play "for fun".

Don't get me wrong, the individual battles in Phoenix Point are quite fun to play, most of the time. They do have this "one more turn" and then "one more battle" draw. As long as you are in a reasonably balanced battle, that is. And balance is certainly not the strength of Phoenix Point. If you compare Phoenix Point to the XCom series, in Phoenix Point the power progression of your soldiers is a lot flatter. You can reach their maximum level pretty quickly, their weapons and armor don't get so much better over the game from research, your squad size only goes up from 6 to 8, and your inventory size is limited and never goes up. Meanwhile the enemies, aliens and humans, go up in numbers and strength more than you do. You end up using cheesy tactics that exploit broken combos or flaws in the AI to win.

So basically I would love a version of Phoenix Point where I could just play individual battles, selecting the number and strength of the enemies. Unfortunately my only option is playing through the campaign, which is pretty tedious, and I don't want to do that again. The next time I want to shoot some aliens in tactical, turn-based battles, I'll reinstall XCom 2.

One of the reasons why I don't post all that frequently anymore is that the work load of my job has increased. That is not all bad news, as more responsibility came with a promotion. But obviously more time spent working means less time for hobbies. And that affects not just blogging, but also the time for games themselves.

In Dungeons & Dragons I have two groups I run as the DM. Having less time for preparation, I came up with a deceptively simple plan: Group A is now playing the campaign that group B played before, while group B is now playing the campaign that group A played before. Which means that a good part of the preparation is already done, battlemaps drawn, miniatures 3D-printed, etc. In terms of reducing my preparation work, the plan is a success.

However it turns out that the replayability of D&D campaigns isn't all that great. The players don't notice, because for them the campaigns are new. But for me as a DM, running the same campaign a second time turns out to be less fun. I had thought that the relatively open nature of pen & paper roleplaying would mean a very different experience when playing the same campaign again with a different group. But in fact it isn't all that different. There are a handful of occurrences where one group made a decision very different from the previous group. But more often than not the players just follow the story along predictable paths, and do more or less the same than the previous group. That is why for example I'm not blogging what happened in my D&D sessions anymore, as it isn't sufficiently different from what I blogged when I played the same campaign with the previous group.

Now one of these groups is meeting infrequently, and I'm okay running the old campaign with them. For the more active group in the Zeitgeist campaign, I will reach the end of the campaign in about 3 sessions. And then I'll try something new. Of which I'll blog more at a later date.

As I mentioned previously, the "easy" difficulty setting of Phoenix Point isn't really easy, and you can easily run into a wall and be unable to progress any further. On the positive side, Phoenix Point is a single-player offline game, which means that it isn't protected against cheating. So how can you create a game of Phoenix Point which is easy, without being trivial?

What you neat is a software called Cheat Engine 7.0. It enables you to search for values in a game, and change them. There are three types of basic resources in Phoenix point, materials, tech, and food, and they are saved in "float" format. If you know that, you can for example search for the value of your current supply of materials, then spend some materials on manufacturing something, and do a second search within the search results of the first search for the new value. That usually turns up a single address, which you can then change, and presto, unlimited amounts of materials.

While that by itself obviously already makes the game easier, the real trick comes afterwards: The reason why you can easily get stuck in Phoenix Point is that the aliens evolve with every battle you fight against them. The more you fight, the stronger they get. Cheating your supply of materials, tech, and food means you can now skip the scavenging battles. Less battles against the aliens means easier to fight aliens. To make up for the lost xp, you build 3 training centers in your home base, and then you can actually get your soldiers stronger faster than the aliens get stronger.

I have played every single game in the XCom series. According to Steam I played the last two games, XCom: Enemy Unknown for 161 hours, and XCom 2 for 209 hours. So I know these type of games quite well, and usually play them well enough. In Phoenix Point I play at the lowest difficulty level, Rookie, and after a bit over one game month I find the game very challenging. That is to say that I have to savescum a lot just to survive. And I am not alone, a lot of people complain about how difficult Phoenix Point is, while the fans reply that you can counter the overpowered aliens by a few overpowered broken builds for your soldiers. I don't think that is good game design.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a game having hard and impossible difficulty levels. Sometimes I like a challenge, and some people will only play games that are very challenging. However if a game has a selection of difficulty levels at the start, the lowest difficulty level should be appropriate for players who are either new to the genre, or just want to play casually. Phoenix Point clearly fails in that respect.

There are a few things that Phoenix Point does better than XCom. For example the Geoscape is a lot more lively, with more stuff to do. For XCom 2 I actually used a mod that added more stuff to do to the Geoscape, because otherwise sometimes you just had to wait for something to happen. Flying around and exploring in Phoenix Point is fun. The reticle targeting system is less frustrating than the percentage display in XCom, when you miss those 90% shots. The class system in which at level 4 you can add a second class to your soldier is fun too, because it allows for some very nice combos. I have a lot of Assault-Snipers, because the Dash and Return Fire abilities of the Assault class are very good, but many aliens are nearly impossible to hit or damage with assault rifles. On the downside the system isn't very balanced, and apparently allows for some completely overpowered combos at level 7. Or, as Reddit advised: "Build 3 training centers in your home base, don't do any missions until all your soldiers are level 7, then use this build and stomp the aliens". Again, I don't think that is good game design.

Most of the rest of the game of Phoenix Point isn't quite as good as the XCom games. Research often results in just a few resources, or a sidegrade, it takes forever for research to result in you actually getting better equipment. In XCom the research was definitely more fun. The soldier recruiting system is tedious and somewhat random. There aren't all that many different types of aliens. And while the vehicles are a good insurance against ambush missions, they aren't as useful as the three soldiers they block the place of in other missions. Also, on the technical side, Phoenix Point has a lot more bugs than the games of the XCom series had after release.

Now, a lot of these flaws could still be addressed in future patches or DLCs. Although, seeing already 3 DLCs announced when you start a game makes me feel as if some of the flaws or lack of content is deliberate, to make more money. And while I would recommend XCom 2 to anybody who hasn't played this sort of game yet, Phoenix Point is obviously a good option for people who like me have already played a lot of the XCom games, and are looking for something new. Nevertheless, I am happy that I didn't pay for this game, I got it as part of Xbox Game Pass for PC subscription.

I've been playing some hours of Phoenix Point now, about to start a new game because I lost too many soldiers which turn out to be very hard to replace. But apart from such minor differences as how hard it is to recruit soldiers, or how exactly the tech tree looks like, Phoenix Point is essentially the same game as XCom 2. The basic game flow is the same, a geoscape with resource management, and turn-based tactical fights against aliens. In detail there are things I like better in XCom 2, and other features which I like better in Phoenix Point. But for somebody who hasn't played either, it doesn't make much of a difference which of these two games to pick up.

That leads to interesting subject of fungibility of games: In how far can I replace game A by game B of the same genre without it making much of a difference? Steam alone has over 30,000 games on it, and it is safe to say that there are far less different genres of games. Depending on how narrow or wide you define genre, you can find dozens or even hundreds of games of the same genre.

I am currently downloading Final Fantasy XV from the Xbox game pass for PC. If I consider Final Fantasy XV to be a very different game from let's say Dragon Quest XI, the Xbox game pass cannot provide me with all possible games. But if I am okay to just play any reasonably recent and good JRPG, a service like Xbox game pass for PC is maybe all I ever need. If I feel the desire to play a JRPG, and I have access to FFXV as part of an ongoing 4€/month subscription, do I really need to go to Steam and buy Dragon Quest XI for €60 anymore? If I want to play a shooter, should I bother with installing Blizzard's Battle.net and pay €60 for the latest Call of Duty, or am I equally well off if I just play Gears 5?

The fans will always insist that game A is much better than game B of the same genre. But of course you'll also find the fans of game B, who claim that it is much better than game A. The more casual a gamer you are, the less of a difference it makes which of these games you play. And then the convenience of a single platform with a single and relatively low monthly cost compared to individual game purchases is a big advantage. The monthly service doesn't have to offer 30,000 games in order to compete with Steam, it only has to offer enough games to cover a variety of different genres.

World of Tanks today had the first of seven "black market" sales. At exactly 5 pm CET every day for a week a limited number of one rare tank go on sale, some for gold, some for credits. For example today you could buy a Lansen C for 8.5 million credits. If you were there at exactly 5 pm, because at 5:02 the 12,000 copies were sold out. And I don't think this is a good idea.

Obviously some of the demand for black market tanks comes from their rarity, so the very limited number of copies sold is part of the appeal. But if they are sold out in under 2 minutes, the demand obviously far exceeded the supply. Wargaming could easily have sold two times or five times more, without exhausting demand. And even if they would have sold an unlimited quantity the whole day long, but just that one day, it wouldn't have affected the "rarity" much. So it seems to me they left a lot of money on the table.

I didn't buy the Lansen C, although I easily could have. For a Free2Play player who doesn't want to spend any real money, the offer was interesting, because there aren't many ways to get premium tanks without money. And the Lansen C is a decent enough tier 8 premium, which makes good credits, because the shells are cheap and deal good alpha damage. But as somebody who regularly spends money on World of Tanks, I already had better tier 8 premium medium tanks. In fact there aren't many premium tanks left in World of Tanks which I really would want to buy. The E25 maybe, but what are the chances that I will get one?

This brings me to the point which I really dislike about the black market: People were complaining about the luck involved when buying lootboxes for Christmas (World of Tanks doesn't have lootboxes during the rest of the year). But the lootbox event went on for a month, and the rarest tanks had an about 1% drop chance. So the largest available bundle of 75 lootboxes for €100 was far more likely than not to contain all the rare tanks. Seeing how the average content of those lootboxes was worth easily twice the cost, I didn't even consider this "gambling". It's more like buying a raffle ticket at the church fete with a guaranteed prize; the prize might be not exactly the one you were after, but you don't go home empty-handed. Getting a tank from the black market to me seems far more luck-based than the lootboxes. It was lucky that I was actually home at 5 pm, often I would still be at work at that time. And quite a lot of people who wanted that tank ended up not getting one, because of either technical problems, or being short of credits and the offer gone before they could sell another tank to get the money. It seems to me that a lot more people are coming out empty-handed from the black market event than from the lootbox event. If by chance Wargaming sold the exact same rare tanks from the lootbox event in the black market, the average player's chance to get one from the black market would be far lower than from the lootboxes.

Combined with the uncertainty of which tank will be sold when, my chances of getting the tank that I want are pretty slim. Maybe it won't be on offer at all. And if it was, I would need to be there at 5 pm, and then everything would need to go exactly right for me to be one of the lucky few who could buy it. That to me seems to be a pretty shitty way to sell virtual goods.

I finished Dragon Quest XI. That is to say I finished the main story and killed the boss; I didn't continue in the "post-game" content to level up to 99. It took me 60 hours to reach the end, and I was level 57, and that was enough for me. Somehow it was important to me to finish this, although there are a lot of aspects of the game I dislike: The crafting system that is based on you searching every shelf for recipe books, the combat system in which you have half a dozen spells to counter status ailments, but then the boss hits you with half a dozen status ailments that there are no counter spells available for, the very linear story. But getting to the end boss gave me some sense of closure, of having finished this successfully. So, what next?

I am still playing World of Tanks. But I do think I will play this less intensively in 2020 than I did in 2019. Apart from the constant intrinsic "get better" goal, there are only so many extrinsic goals available in any game; and in World of Tanks I feel that I reached most of the goals I was actually interested in. That is mostly due to the failure of the game to attract many new players. It leads to the tier X "end game" filled with veterans that have every advantage you can earn in the game, and know every trick in the book. Having a life, I just can't compete at that level, which means that getting tank tech trees up above tier 8 isn't all that interesting.

So my idea for 2020 is to play more different games. And I have a huge amount of choice there, between my large library of unplayed Steam games, and services like the Xbox game pass for PC. One thing I realized is that I need to be less ambivalent about games: Either I need to stick with them and play them, or I need to uninstall them. I just uninstalled Assassin's Creed: Origin, because I played it a bit (until the end of Siwa, the first large zone), and then decided to play something else and come back to it later. Bad idea! If a game has a combat system that is based on a large number of complicated button combinations on the gamepad, which you learn by playing through the early part of the game where they are explained, you can't really make a long pause without unlearning all that. And then there is no way to get back into the game without starting over, as there is no way to play through the controls tutorial again otherwise.

I think my next game will be Phoenix Point. I only played that for a few hours before getting distracted, so its not a problem to restart and relearn.