December 2017 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Games Played 2017 Edition

December 30, 2022December 29, 2017 by Belghast

Year End Review

One of the weird things that I do is that I attempt to keep track of the games I have played during a given calendar year. I started this madness I believe in 2015 and then have slowly been back populating that list based on a few methods. Essentially I am tracking things on a month by month basis and if I have written about a game or taken screenshots of a game… I log it as having been played during that month. The end result is this weird history of the games I have played over the course of a given calendar year. Seeing as this is the last “weekday” that I will be making a post until the beginning of 2018… I figured it was the perfect time to break out my post talking about the various things I played this year. Without further stalling… here is the data.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

During the course of the year I played a grand total of 41 different games, which is from 57 last year and 67 the year before that. Basically the key difference is that I mostly played MMOs which tend to hold my attention for larger periods of time than burning through a bunch of single player titles. Lets take a swath of the top ten titles and look at them a little closer.

World of Warcraft – 10 months
Destiny – 8 months
Diablo 3 – 7 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 7 months
Horizon Zero Dawn – 7 months
Destiny 2 – 6 months
Pokemon Go – 6 months
Fallout 4 – 5 months
Guild Wars 2 – 4 months
Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 4 months

At first glance the clear king is World of Warcraft with 10 months of play, but if you look back at past years this tends to be the one game that I am almost always at least playing a few days a month. However you notice that I largely took a complete break from the game in March and April and I feel like it is largely due to a few games coming out around the same time… Mass Effect Andromeda, Horizon Zero Dawn and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I feel like the true winner is Destiny and Destiny 2 because if you include those as one game… then I played them every month of the year with some overlap between of two months when I was technically playing both. Granted I am including the time I spent playing various betas of the game but still… I feel like this was the year of Destiny for me personally. I spent significantly less time playing Final Fantasy XIV as I played rabidly during the launch of Stormblood and sorta bounced off otherwise. Another anomaly this year is that Rift did not make the top 10, and similarly odd is how much of a return Pokemon Go has had…. but I largely chock this up to getting a new phone that handles it better. The weirdest part about this years top ten list is that it includes several single player titles: Fallout 4, Horizon Zero Dawn and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. All three of these are games that I keep being able to return to and play again and again in short bursts.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

Multi-Year View

Now if we expand out even further… here is the list of everything I have played since 2012. Things get a little spottier the further you go back. Essentially I have back populated this last by going through all of my old blog posts and jotting down which games I talked about playing. Additionally I have scanned all of the screenshots that I happen to have and divided them up by the month the file was created as an attempt to create a somewhat accurate picture of what I had been playing. Generally speaking if I am playing a game I am taking screenshots because I always need images for my blog. I may or may not have almost 30,000 screenshots sitting on network attached storage… and a stack of every hard drive from every machine I have owned waiting for a day when I feel like going spelunking for more screenshots. I am not even sure why I started down this path but now that I am on it… it has become another obsession of mine. Basically from here on we are going to largely talk about the top fifteen games I have played since 2012.

World of Warcraft – 47 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 42 months
Rift – 37 months
Destiny – 27 months (including D2 31 months)
Elder Scrolls Online – 26 months
Diablo 3 – 23 months
ArcheAge – 13 months
Guild Wars 2 – 13 months
Wildstar – 13 months
Everquest II – 11 months
Fallout 4 – 10 months
Star Wars the Old Republic – 10 months
Trove – 9 months
Pokemon Go – 8 months
The Secret World – 8 months

First interesting pattern is that there is only one non-mmo on this list and that is Fallout 4. I am not entirely certain why I keep returning to that game but there are so many nights I will fire it up on the laptop while doing other things and just roam around. Once again Rift has fallen a bit in the rankings as this time last year it was tied with Final Fantasy XIV for the second place slot. Destiny slides up into number three eclipsing Elder Scrolls Online, especially if you include Destiny 2 playtime which I denoted in quotes. Guild Wars 2 and my resurgence into that game caused it to leapfrog Wildstar a bit, and then the tail end of the list is either new because I expanded things out to top 15 or in a similar position. There are some games on this list that are likely to eventually fall out of the ranking. I am not really playing Everquest II anymore in part because the management since the swap to Daybreak has just been pitiful. Its a torn community and just not the environment I remember loving. Trove may or may not see me returning to it, because I have a friend who is super into that game right now… but also playing on the PS4 and not PC which makes the return to play with him more unlikely. Additionally that game has changed so much since I last played it that I would almost need to start fresh to really get back into it. Similarly I am not sure how much more time I will be devoting to ArcheAge because I just don’t find the game nearly as compelling as I once did. As I leveled in the game it felt like the things I wanted to be doing narrowed rather than broadened given that I have no interest in PVP nonsense. I left shortly before they split the servers into veteran and new player experiences, and I am not even sure what the game looks like right now.

Looking Forward

As far as the calendar year of 2018… I am not really sure what I will be playing. It is a forgone conclusion that I will be playing World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. In spite of me not really liking the more PVP centric focus, I would be lying if I said I would not be playing it at launch. I predict that I will be playing some more SWTOR in the near future because the release of a Star Wars movie always brings out the nostalgia for all things Star Wars. On top of that with Disney pulling the license for Marvel Heroes… I want to make sure I experience the story content in SWTOR just in case they for some reason decide to do the same thing they did with SWG. I know at some point I will make a return to Final Fantasy XIV and more than likely when they patch in the next step of the Palace of the Dead. As far as new games go… there really isn’t much on the horizon that really interests me. I am not enthralled by Crowfall or Camelot Unchained, because they seem to be creating games that don’t really stoke my interests.

Brad McQuaid will likely bring us some sort of version of Pantheon: Rise and Repeat as I heard someone call it the other day (I believe Wilhelm but not 100% sure). I played Everquest, and Vanguard… and Pantheon seems like more of the same just yet another slightly higher fidelity version of the same game Brad has kept trying to create since the 90s. I don’t have near as much nostalgia as some do for the “you must have a group with you at all times and death must be frustrating and painful” genre. Ashes of Creation looks mildly interesting… but what I have seen of the community tells me it is going to be a game I am not going to enjoy much in the same way that I didn’t enjoy ArcheAge at launch. Monster Hunter World is definitely something I am looking forward to giving a shot, in spite of the fact that I am horrible at Monster Hunter games. Anthem also seems really interesting, but the gameplay footage we have seen reminded me a bit too much of the promises Division made but never quite delivered on. In truth in the 2018 calendar year… I expect to keep playing a lot of the same games I played during the past several years because those MMOs just keep getting better with age.

Radiolarian Paradox

December 28, 2017 by Belghast

The world is a really weird place and I sometimes have trouble reconciling just how random it is. Yesterday after legitimate decades of not being in contact… I had a friend I grew up with reach out via the email address on this blog. As the day went on we chatted and for the most part found out that we are still drift compatible. We fell out of contact for reasons that quite honestly I have probably talked about on this blog at some point without assigning names or faces to the situation. However I always sorta hoped at some point he would find his way back into my monkeysphere and that seems to have actually occurred. It is super weird to get back in touch with someone who hasn’t been around for the last two decades. Like for example he knows my wife, but at the time we were last in regular contact we were dating and not married. In that time I have shifted through many jobs and titles and positions… and had the birth of the blog and podcast and my attempts at writing for a gaming site and then determining that wasn’t really for me. So much life has happened for both of us and it is weird trying to slip back into a friendship from so many years ago. Regardless it was a really cool happening to close out 2017, a year that has been generally crummy in so many other ways.

Lately I have fallen into a pattern with my evenings where I spend a little time in World of Warcraft knocking out the daily emissary chest and doing any world quests that have interesting rewards. Then I usually end up swapping over to Destiny 2 and doing whatever package schematic is available that day to get more Dawning rewards for free. I’ve talked about it at length in another post, but the Dawning being a largely cash shop holiday has been immensely frustrating for me. This was an event that I was so into when it happened in Destiny 1 in part because it brought back the sparrow racing league and ushered in the beginning of strike scoring. As it stands now I cannot seem to bring myself to run strikes of any form because they largely feel pointless. The bane of my existence at the moment is the Advanced Paradox Amplifier needed to get several of the prophecy weapon unlocks. These come from Strikes, Heroic Adventures and Crucible matches… and come extremely sparingly at that. I have been mostly grinding them out by chaining the new mayhem mode crucible matches and unfortunately most of the time you wind up with a single Paradox Amplifier per match… that you then need to turn in ten of to get the advanced variety. Unfortunately both the Strikes and Heroic Adventures award with the same frequency meaning that you can either do two things that take a significant amount of time… or grind your face off in PVP. I feel like part of me is completely dead inside from all of the crucible I have done lately, because I really don’t enjoy it… but I want the items that I can potentially get from doing it.

What makes this so painful is that Radiolarian Cultures seem to drop like candy from every public event or chest you open. I can spend 30 minutes and roam around opening chests on a planet and get more than enough to do several weapons, and then I am stuck grinding for legitimately hours to get a single blue quality advanced Paradox Amplifier. Throwing another thing into the mix I apparently need Fossilized Hermaion Blossoms which drop in Nightfalls. I need two of these so does this mean I will have to complete two Nightfalls in order to get this step done, or does this simply mean that they drop two at a time? The prophecy weapon grinds are largely frustrating because there is no real casual activity on the Paradox side of the equation. Had they said… you could do strikes, crucible matches or lost sectors… that would have been something that I could piddle around on my own happily doing for hours. Instead strikes feel too long and unrewarding, crucible matches are mind numbing, and the heroic adventure mechanism is just generally unfun especially since they included another god forsaken timer. At this point I have completed Hand Cannon, Pulse Rifle, SMG, and Sword… and now seemingly am working on the Saint-14 shotgun. I need to chain run a bunch of strikes over the next few days so I can get the currency to purchase Curtain Call from Zavala before the weapons swap again next Wednesday. I am in this weird place with Destiny 2, where I keep playing because I love the moment to moment gunplay… but keep getting frustrated by the myopic design.

Cursed Images

December 27, 2017 by Belghast

I don’t have a whole lot to say this morning. It is my first day back to work… and that is hard enough without having to suddenly have things to talk about on my blog. I figured I would reshare these photos because I clearly did not creep out enough people over twitter. One of the things my wife and I enjoy doing is what we call “going junking”. Now technically we tend to be visiting a bunch of “antique malls” but in truth we are not looking for the high class ones. Instead we want the ones with weird stuff in them and they rarely disappoint. First up on the left is a doll that I am absolutely certain has killed someone at some point. It looks like it is probably possessed and if you take it home will let you star in your own Blumhouse film. Next up is something that I am guessing someone created while in the deconstructionist phase of a meth high? I am sure it sounded like a good idea to take apart the lamp and the doll… but when they came down and tried to put things back together they maybe got something wrong in the process. The thing is it wouldn’t be anywhere near as creepy if they just left the doll head out of the equation. It might have even been slightly funny to see a doll with a lampshade for a head… but instead they created a plasticine dullahan. Lastly is a legitimate product of the 1980s where someone thought it was a good idea to create a bear lamp out. I am guessing that this is one of those weird castings that pottery stores used to keep around for people to come in, purchase, glaze and then walk out with a pseudo finished product. My aunt was super into that sort of thing and my family has a lot of porcelain Christmas trees and puffy precious-moments-esc native american dolls as a result. This however just went south at some point during that process and apparently no one actually realized that punching holes in the doll for light to come through looked like a teddy bear roadkill carcass? Apologies to everyone with trypophobia that I am apparently going to trigger again, but I figured everyone needed to see this madness.

Occasionally my trips however yield things that are actually rather cool. Like these two glass skulls that I found in a junk store in Muskogee. I would legitimately love to have them, but have no clue what I would actually do with them. It isn’t like I really have a proper place to display glass skulls and everything in my house is moments away from being knocked off by a bored cat. Granted my glass mannequin head that I have in my office has survived a tumble from bookcase onto the carpeted floor and I am certain these are equally of sturdy make. Had I come across them in college I likely would have snapped them up in a heartbeat, but I have reached the point where I realize that 99% of the things that I see in the world that I think are cool… are probably things I can live without. Largely it isn’t about denying myself cool stuff, but more that I already have a ton of cool stuff that takes up too much space. As a result when I snap a photo of something at one of these junk stores, it is me collecting its image rather than having to lug home the actual item. The trip and the discovery and the memory are the parts that really matter. Sure we occasionally drag things home, like we stumbled across an amazing pixel art plastic canvas booth at the same place the cursed bear came from. I walked away with a tiny tardis keyfob that I have on my badge lanyard, and an adorable Ewok and Nintendo controller magnet that I will put up in the cube at work. Those are small bits of awesome that I can easily fit into my life, but these bigger objects are just harder for find a proper place for. Half of the fun of these trips is sitting back and trying to figure out what the hell the person who purchased the item in the first place was thinking. Every object has a story and it is interesting to try and sort out how the thing in front of you ended up where it is now.

Adventures in 4k Panels

December 26, 2017 by Belghast

I am getting a super late start this morning because I am still in holiday mode at least until I go back to work tomorrow morning. Then thankfully I have a short two day week before I get back into holiday mode for a four day weekend. One of the things that I did over the break was obsess over 4k televisions and drive my wife insane. We both do this thing when we are researching a purchase, where we slowly shift into a mode where we cannot seem to talk about anything other than the thing we are delving into. Then at some point the other one is like “just buy the fucking thing already” so we don’t have to think or hear about it anymore. For me this tends to be technology… and for my wife this tends to be things like cars but regardless we have both had to go through this cycle for the other one. This time around it was my desire for a better monitor for my PC upstairs. For the last several years I have used a pair of 23 inch mismatched monitors and a separate television in another area of my office for all of my gaming consoles. The idea that got planted in my head is… what if I could use the same “monitor” for both purposes.

What lead me down the path of using a television as a monitor is the pricetag. Most of the televisions that I looked at were in the 300-400 price range for a 43 inch 4k panel, and the equivalent monitors are 700-1000 with a 200 dollar premium added on if you want G-Sync for your Nvidia video card. At this point most televisions and monitors are both IPS LCD panels, often times manufactured in the same plants so I wondered how much difference could there possibly be. The reality is that a Television and a Monitor are serving different purposes and as a result they have mutated into very different beasts. For the most part a Monitor focuses on precision of making sure that everything on the screen is pixel perfect and has an extremely high refresh rate. Televisions however are focused on trying to provide a smooth viewing experience and as a result have a bunch of software hacks to try and make the picture look better than it actually is. All of these things however get in the way of what we want from a gaming display, so as a result I focused on some very specific things.

The first problem with a television is that it has a significant amount of input lag as compared to a monitor. While this is a stat that is just part of the default specifications block on a monitor, it is nowhere to be seen on a television. As a result you have to rely on third party sites that have done the testing to determine what the input lag is for a given television. This will end up producing some really unexpected results. You would think that all of the televisions in a specific product family would be very similar, but there are a lot of cases where the 40 or 43 inch television in the range has double the input lag of the 50 or 55 inch television. There are lots of sites out there if you just google “television input lag” but an example of one is RTings.com. It will take some digging to narrow down which specific site has the test data for the television you are looking at. Ultimately this narrowed my search down to a few television models.

When you look up the refresh rates for these you see that the LG is 12.7-12 ms depending on mode, the TCL is 14.6-15 ms depending on mode, and the Samsung rounds out the pack as the slowest with 19.8-20 ms input lag. Now if you compare this to a monitor… those generally have 5 ms or less input lag. Basically I wanted to get this as low as possible so immediately I started leaning towards the LG panel. When you compare price wise… this fluctuated significantly over the course of the weeks I spent researching this. At the time of writing this… you can find very similar prices on each of them…

The Samsung 43 has a MSRP of $379.99 but I could not actually find it being sold anywhere for that. Best Buy has it for $499.99 currently and Amazon only has it available through third party sellers. As you can see already… the deck was sorta stacked in the favor of the LG panel and this only became more so when Target last week was running a deal on Cartwheel that gave an additional 10% off on all televisions which took the pre-tax price down to $297. We have a bad habit of letting gift cards just sit around unused and we happened to have a stack of smallish target cards like the $5 ones you get from using the cartwheel app. All total this took the final price that I had to pay out of my pocket down to around $250 post tax.

The next gotcha with these televisions is that they state they can run at 120hz, but the reality is that this is a psuedo “motion rate” that requires you to use some of the interpolation technology while viewing television and movies to actually achieve it. If you are going to run this as a monitor however you are going to be turning all of this off and running in “Game Mode”. The reality there is that you can run 4k at 60hz and 1080p at 120hz… but only if you use the right cable set up, which was my next big challenge. With a monitor you would be relying on display port cables to get your best picture quality, however none of these televisions have that option. They instead have HDMI 2.0 which is in theory good enough, but you need to make sure you are using a 4k rated high speed HDMI cable. I happened to have a display port to HDMI cable laying around, but as it turned out it was not 4k rated. What ended up happening is that I got a washed out picture and Windows was only able to run the display at 30hz, making it a completely unacceptable experience.

After trying a few cables I had laying around I found a Amazon basics high speed cable that I had ordered some time ago when I hooked up my 8 way HDMI switcher. This allowed me to get the full 60hz but cased a lot of display issues. I could have lived with it but all of the text on screen had for lack of a better term… a red glow of about one pixel beyond the text. After a lot more research the suggestions all pointed to the problem being that the HDMI ports on the back of my Geforce GTX 980 were not capable of pushing that much data without artifacts. The solution appeared to be getting a highly rated Display Port to HDMI adapter to get the clearest possible signal out of my video card and then again relying on the high speed HDMI cable to finish the transit to the television. I hooked this all up last night and the results were immediate and breathtaking. Now I legitimately cannot tell a difference between the 23 inch secondary monitor and the 4k television serving the role of monitor. For those wanting to go down this same path… I highly suggest checking out the following parts.