Hey everyone,
Since Absolver and Heat Signature both announced some pretty rad Halloween-themed events (which goes a long way toward soothing the pain of no Festival of the Lost in Destiny 2 this year) it got me thinking: are there any other seasonal events in video games that the Waypoint community is into/looking forward to?
For me it used to be the TF2 Halloween updates (the only time of the year I’d play), the Eldritch Halloween dungeon (which is just permanently in the game now), and Destiny’s Festival of the Lost (even though it was bullshit that the masks didn’t have any stats on them). This year, I really encourage everyone to look up the latest changelog to Heat Sig, at minimum.
I just came out the other end of the Love Nikki-Dress UP Queen spooky outfit event and it was probably the worst experience I’ve had with that game.
Anyways, anyone else into these weird, sometimes fun, little updates? Or do you just boot up a regular-ass scary game for Halloween and, I don’t know, drink egg nog while playing your usual stuff during the holidays?
Halloween in Guild Wars 2 is probably my favorite of all the seasonal events in that game, especially since they added new armor skins this year! It’s mostly a grind-fest, but putting on a podcast and farming in the labyrinth has been pretty profitable for me.
as a young teenager playing f2p mmos non-stop i’d always love the events, general winter/christmas especially. i’ve always admired TF2’s huge holiday updates as well, but have fallen out with that game. now my ritual is bloodborne/vampire: the masquerade bloodlines playthroughs for halloween, and for christmas you gotta play play elf bowling. but i do get nostalgic and wish for a time when i could still immerse myself in a little shallow MMO with those events aplenty.
Cave Story has tons and tons of Halloween themed sprites which change every character into their cute Halloween costumes. Not sure which versions have this, but Cave Story+ at least does.
seconding the gw2 halloween event! i don’t really play the holiday events on gw2 all that much but i love the atmosphere changes they make to the game. also the new armor this year looks neat!
probably my favorite “seasonal” event for gw2 was dragon bash in june 2013, though. unfortunately it was only a one-time event that doesn’t seem likely to come back (given the tone of the story right now) but that was probably the holiday event i participated in the most. seeing the holographic shatterer soar above lion’s arch was pretty great.
i’m also really liking fate/grand order’s halloween event. it’s got a short goofy story, a useful & interesting event exclusive character who i’ve grown to love, & it’s pretty easy to clear out the event shop with some casual grinding which is very useful to me because i was in dire need of some of the ascension materials in it, lol. (note: i’m talking about the first halloween event on the NA server…i’ve heard JP server’s halloween event this year is way more intense)
I have fond memories of the Sonic Adventure 2 holiday download content available on the Dreamcast. I don’t think I found them until 2002, but they were still available through the Dreamcast’s super wonkey web browser. Pretty sure the Halloween levels were the first DLC I ever played.
I don’t think the levels were anything more than reskins that added more ghosts or weird music, but it was incredible to play more of a game I loved by downloading additional content.
I haven’t touched Love Nikki in about 2 months (after putting a stupid amount of money into it) so could you elaborate on why it was so bad?
As for other seasonal events, I’ve played so many events in World of Warcraft that they sort of all blend together but Brewfest was always a highlight. Even though I don’t actually have any idea of what holiday Brewfest was meant to be celebrating, I still enjoyed the ram riding mini-game and the…no, that’s the only one I remember. WoW’s Halloween was always too centered around PVP for me, but their Children’s Week was always a bit of fun too. It’s nice when the game has you do objectives that aren’t just combat, although the seasonal bosses were also fun sometimes. Headless Horseman had great mechanics if I remember correctly.
Demons Souls had “world tendency” where it would go between White and Black depending on whether more Good or Bad things happened. The darker the world, the tougher the enemies, and certain events would only happen in a purely White or Black world.
It was actually tough to get a world purely White or Black, and if you played online, every time you started the game, it would set your world tendency based on some global average tendency, which tended to be slightly White. The loot wouldn’t be quite as good, but enemies would be a little easier and your character would have a little more health.
For Halloween 2009, Atlus fixed the global World Tendency to Pure Black. No hats. No goofy characters. Just setting the game, within the standard parameters, to kick your ass even more than usual. And if you knew what you were doing, a chance at the best loot in the game.
