History and Games This Week
Welcome to the week in history and games, a short collection of links to stories and news that we hope you find interesting.
We missed you last week! Bob and his family were still recovering from the awful weather and subsequent power outages in Texas, while John spent Monday morning meditating and staring at the foot of water in his basement. We decided we could take a week off.
John has been playing a bunch of Valheim with his seven year old, because whatever time-elastic era between 2020 and 2021 we now inhabit has apparently become the Age of Viking for Video Game People, and because you can get a lot of mileage out of house building. The game's success is startling and heartwarming, the latest reminder that small teams can achieve much success in video games. This seems to have spread to the game's co-operative community as well: Emma Kent writes about an amazing group of players who will join your server and help recover your items if you met your demise in an area you otherwise are not going to get back to. The creativity of the Valheim player base is pretty astonishing as well. A lot of people are building Viking homes! Or what they think are Viking homes! Or what they have researched Viking homes look like! I am hopeful we are going to have some good Valheim historical writing out there soon.
Noclip, the video game documentary folks who recently made some changes to their Patreon, have announced that their classic video game series "Greatest Hits" will begin with Rollercoaster Tycoon. We're excited to see how Noclip approach this.
We mentioned in the last of these Monday updates that Diablo 2 was coming back and that some of us were pretty excited... Well, Blizzard has doubled down on their service to the past - and many of our youths - by ensuring people can use saves from the original version of the game in the upcoming remaster. Some context here: a lot of fans were pretty upset with Warcraft III: Reforged, both in terms of its execution and its poor comparison to Blizzard's promises. Fan service like this seems to be largely driven by those frustrations. Some very recent history there.
I leave you with a fantastic bit of video game madness: someone has decided to create a mod that bridges the games Crusader Kings 3 and Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord so that you can play out the battles of your various grand strategy machinations from the former game in the latter. Amazing. One day we will perhaps create and subsequently play the ultimate historical video game.
