Defiance

The Dream

It is now 4 am and my body has decided that I have slept enough for the night.  I ended up going to bed very early, so I guess in a way it makes sense as I normally only get 5/6 hours of sleep a night.  I had the most interesting dream, and since it is sort of game related I figure what the hell… might as well blog about it.  In the dream I was summoned to Blizzard HQ, but I have no real idea why I was asked to be there.   When I got there I was given a name badge and ushered into a room with a bunch of other people.  There were computers and a big table and folks were spread around the room working on various things.  It felt like a first day of work kind of scenario where people look to busy themselves until they are given real work to do.

Throughout next few hours people from various disciplines would come in and talk to us.  At this point it started to feel like a job interview.  I remember one of the guys was a quest designer and he started asking us questions about triggers and spawners, and it turned out that he was having a specific problem with a specific quest.  He ended up digging out a mockup of the zone and explained the problem.  I’ve had quite a bit of experience building zones in various emulator projects, and ended up redoing the entire Butcherblock > Greater Faydark > Crushbone sequence in one of my times playing with the Everquest emulator at home, so I figured what the hell.  Turned out there was a place on the map that the player had to move through that was an nice tight bottleneck and a trigger could be placed there that everyone would pass over.

At this point I am getting excited because I feel useful, and maybe have a shot at whatever this interview process happens to be.  But as the day goes on the reality sits in, that I am 37 and established in my career, with a wife who is very established in her career.  No matter how cool it would be to work at a place like Blizzard, there is no way I could uproot all of that on the shot at following my boyhood dream of working in the games industry.  Additionally there was the hard reality that I already make more than most of my friends in the industry, and where I am has a good pension system that I am already fully vested in.  Basically my chance at that dream died a long long time ago, and any desire to do it is just sort of an aftershock.  The weird thing is… I am realizing all of this while I am dreaming and while my dream self is at Blizzard HQ.

We end up breaking for lunch, at which point the more dream like qualities start to sit in.  Like for some reason I managed to make it to Anaheim California… without my wallet.  I guess this is the new version of arriving at school in your underwear maybe?  It is around this point that I wake up, and am fully wide away with no hope of returning to sleep and attempting to continue where the dream left off.  I never really found out why I was there and what exactly they were doing.  The funny thing is, of all of the games companies my brain seemed to latch onto Blizzard.  Don’t get me wrong I would love to work at a place like that, and everything I have heard about the environment is that it is a great place to be.  But of all the games I have played, my relationship with World of Warcraft seems the most tumultuous.  I guess the dream is just a sign that no matter how many times I try and pack the dream of working in the industry away… it keeps rising back to the surface.

Defiance

Defiance 2014-05-28 04-36-53-073 It was a really odd evening last night, and I was in that odd place where I was really too tired to play much of anything.  It has been torrential raining here in Oklahoma over the last three days, and last night about 6 pm we noticed a potential break in the weather that would allow us to go out and get our walk in.  As a result by the time we had finished at 6:30 I had hit 11,000 steps and was just absolutely exhausted.  I crashed out on the couch which meant playing on my laptop, so continuing my Wolfenstein: New Order game was out of the question.  I ping ponged around a bunch of different games, the first of which was Defiance.  This is one of those games that I really want to like, but for whatever reason I seem to constantly spin my wheels in.  I guess in part I don’t know what exactly I am supposed to be doing.  I’ve literally been wandering around the Mount Tam zone since the game released, and there seems to be no real direction on how I get out of it.

As a result each time I do play, I end up wandering around and doing quests that I have probably completed a dozen other times.  The moment to moment game play is fun, as it always has been…  but I feel like I am missing some over arching narrative that I should be following.  For ages folks have talked about how much they liked the story content, but the one I tried didn’t seem terribly soloable.  I feel like this game would be so much better with other people playing it, yet each time I play it I am pretty much soloing because I literally know no one else that is regularly booting it up.  At the very least I doubt anyone is as low level as I am still.  I feel like there has to be some concept that I am just not catching.  I think next time I play I am just going to move out of Mount Tam and see what else I can find.  I have no clue what lies at the end of the zone, because I always end up logging out before I get there.

A New Idea

For a few days I have been thinking about starting a new feature.  The idea is to close out each post with a quick section about what I intend to do that night.  This is of course an intention, and lord knows what might occur between my post in the morning and that evening.  However the intent is two fold, firstly since I play so damned many games it will help to give me focus on an objective.  Secondly since I hang out with so many different people in those games, it gives folks warning about what I should be playing that evening.

Tonight I’m Playing Elder Scrolls Online.  Tonight is the semi-weekly event over there that we have been trying to pull together lately.  If you are interested in joining along in the fun, check out the Anook event.  The intent is to go from 9pm CST until whenever folks start losing consciousness… which usually means around 11pm CST.  Since we have done two weeks in Cyrodil, I was going to try and mix things up a bit.  I am sure everyone has dungeons that they need run, so my goal is to try and pair people up in groups relative to their level range.  If this doesn’t work, then we will fall back on another romp in Cyrodil.  We are going to play it by ear which way we end up going.  If you do intend to go please sign up on the event so I have an idea for what kind of numbers we are expecting.  The last few weeks we’ve had around a dozen people interested.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Defiance

5 thoughts on “Defiance”

  1. I expect it’s purely because with all the drama lately surrounding Blizzard, they, as a company, were somewhat on your mind. Dreams are that simple sometimes. 🙂

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