Year End Wall of Text

Over the last few days I have been doing a number of posts to review the year that is ending, and with today being the last day of 2018…  I thought I would probably do another one. This time however it is probably going to downshift considerably and get into personal territory.  It was an odd year for me specifically and quite frankly… not an amazing one. My world had been fairly hectic and as a result it has trickled down to effecting how I view this blog and the games I end up playing.

This was the year that I took over as Manager of my section at work being comprised of three different subject areas.  That means that on any given day I am responsible for roughly fifteen other lives, not to mention a handful of individuals that may not actually report to me but regularly seek advisement.  Now this is something I have steadily moved towards over the last decade, but even with that… I am not sure I was quite prepared for the stress level increase.

I am now accountable not only for the actions of myself, or previously the actions of the handful of application developers…  but also the actions of a whole bunch of people that I am significantly less integrated with. So this year has been in large part about me getting accustomed to this role and learning everything I can about the roles of everyone that was not a traditional developer before the transition.

We also had a pretty significant shake up position wise and saw me having to go on a hiring spree in which I filled several positions.  As is the case with hiring there is a certain trickle effect where… someone higher up leaves, and you promote someone into that position…  which leaves another vacancy and so on. This meant for what felt like six months I was doing interviews… which is weirdly more tiring than you might think.  The positive is that I got to promote a lot of great people who were waiting in the wings… and also hire several more awesome people in the process.

It is weird how much leading guilds in MMORPGs prepared me for this role, and in truth I wish we lived in a world where that was more recognizable as valid experience.  Had I not lead guilds and raids there is no way I would have had the people skills required to make the transition work at all. If you can convince 20-40 strangers to do something…  then you can convince 10-15 people you can actually sit in the same room with to make the changes needed that have actual tangible benefits to their lives.

On the gaming front however 2018 was a pretty lonely year for me, and I found myself withdrawing further and further away from anything resembling organized play.  I think part of this comes from the fact that by the time I got home… I was “over socialized” from having to be responsible for so many other people. Another part of this comes from the fact that things that happened in 2016 and 2017 were starting to really affect me in 2018.

For years I had been in the habit of hanging out every night on voice chat with the various members of the AggroChat community, be it either the other five members of the podcast or the various folks that surrounded it.  When the podcast started it was made up of 4 members that lived in the EST timezone and myself and another that lived in CST. That meant at worst we were an hour apart and pretty drift compatible as it comes to gaming together.

For years I was used to getting up at 5:30 in the morning and going to bed around midnight.  However with the way my life has changed that is just no longer sustainable. Now as the night wears on I start to wind down around 9-9:30 and play for thirty minutes or so on my phone before falling asleep around 10ish.  So that alone has greatly lowered my window of viability from having about five hours each night to do things in… to a much shorter three hour window.

Starting in 2015 a change happened…  slowly at first but it built over time.  It began with the migration westward of Tamrielo to Seattle, and before long Kodra had accepted what seemed to be his dream job and joined him.  A little bit after that Ashgar migrated as well because he had the functionality to work remotely from pretty much anywhere. Before I even really grasped the ramifications, half of our show was located on the West Coast and as such two hours behind me.

What this meant in practice is all too often they were showing up to play games…  at roughly the same time I was trying to disengage for the night. For a long while this was okayish, because I still had Thalen and Grace to hang out with, but I found myself spending less and less time in voice chat, because there was nothing more depressing than an empty server… or in our case a server with a ghost of Kodra on it because he never logs out of anything.  

Grace and I did more and more together because we seemed to usually be playing the same games.  However this year Thalen and Grace both had life changing events alter their play schedules and as such I am sort of now the odd man out as it were.  So I am left with this decision… do I just accept that I am a single player gamer or do I invest the social capitol that it takes to branch out and find new groups of people to play with?  Because of the draining nature of my work changes… the answer has generally been that I just sit alone and figure out things to do that don’t actually require other people to do them.

This is not a cry for help mind you, because there are a constant string of awesome people who keep inviting me to do things with them.  Squirrel and Waren are always offering assistance on the Destiny 2 front, and I have a list of people that I could be doing stuff with in Monster Hunter World as well.  Similarly the Final Fantasy XIV free company is super active and all it would take is for me to show up on the right nights to get back engaged with doing lots of things with them.  The problem is… all of these things take a number of “spoons” that I generally do not have in my drawer.

Two Thousand and Eighteen was a year when I felt completely out of sync with everything going on around me.  I am hoping that Two Thousand and Nineteen can see me finding ways to remedy that. Since tomorrow is New Years I am likely going to call it a holiday and not make post, but Wednesday I will return with a post about some of the ways I am hoping to change my current situation.  The last few years have been rough, and I am hoping in this next year some things start to turn around. Sorry for ending the year on a bit of a bummer post… but I sorta had to write what was in my mind.  As not to end the post on a complete downturn…  this year was also the year I got back into contact with a good friend of mine from High School so that was definitely in the wins column.

Games of the Blog 2018 Edition

Traditionally at this time of year you start seeing a bunch of review and award posts, and quite frankly I am not beneath this in the least.  However since we are recording our official AggroChat Games of the Year show this weekend, I thought I would kick off this morning with a sort of “Games of the Blog” post.  I am not going to be handing out awards or anything of the sort but instead just going to be spending some time this morning talking about the games that were really important to me during this calendar year.  The problem with “of the year” stuff is that I always get tied up on the minutiae of whether or not I should only pick games that came out during a specific calendar year, or if I can freely pick the games that I played and meant something to me.  In the end this blog post is likely going to be an amalgam of the two.

Monster Hunter World – PC

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If I was going to pick a true “Game of the Year” then it would probably be Monster Hunter World because I have spent more time playing it than probably any other game.  It released in January on the Playstation 4 and I played my way through to past Tempered Kirin and into my 50s for Hunter Rank.  Then I turned around and completely restarted the game when it released on PC in August and pushed my way back up past Tempered Kirin and into the 60s on my Hunter Rank.  I call out Tempered Kirin because it really is the bottle neck for progression and is a truly painful fight…  if you are apparently anyone other than Tam who supposedly breezed right past it?  The main reason why this game deserves the prime honors for this year is two fold…  firstly I played it all year long and never stopped being engaged with it.  While I might take breaks I can always return happily and there is always something for me to strive towards be it a weapon or a piece of gear or a new event that is happening for a limited time.

The secondary reason is that this is the game that made me “Grok” Monster Hunter as a franchise.  I have purchased several versions of this franchise and each time have bounced extremely hard off of it, because quite frankly the games do a poor job of on-boarding you into this world.  They were a game series that assumed you had been playing since the Playstation 2 days and would just simply know what to do without any question.  Monster Hunter World on the other hand took time to teach you the ropes and while it has a lot of weird things going on…  in the fact that its grouping system is obtuse as hell…  it is manageable and becomes way less so on the PC which utilizes Steam social groups in place of a clan or guild.  I love this game so much and am completely amped for the expansion later this year, and for the most part this has been a year about me playing Monster Hunter World and Destiny 2 as my primary MMOs.  If you have not played this game then I highly suggest you check it out soon.  If you end up picking it up on the PC let me know, because I am more than happy to show new folks the ropes.

Destiny 2 Forsaken – PC

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During Destiny 1 the Taken King expansion refocused the game and greatly improved the moment to moment interactions, and was more or less the point where I turned from a casual fan to a rabid fanatic.  Destiny 2 on the other hand had a really rough start and it felt like they had simply not learned from the three years of lessons taught by Destiny 1.  With the launch of Forsaken…  Destiny 2 had its Taken King moment where they tweaked all of the things that needed tweaking and presented the best version of the game to the public.  The game went from being something that I played but often times felt like I had no real focus…  to being a game that I rabidly consume in a weekly cycle that never quite gives me enough time to actually feel like I have done “all the things”.  There are so many micro objectives to accomplish and the moment to moment gameplay feels so much more improved, removing all of my complaints from year one.  Forsaken presented a story that was not quite what I was expecting, and gave us a choose your own adventure path to move through it.  However the real reason why it is on this list is the massive replayability, and the ability for me to drop in any given night and have plenty of things that I want to be doing.  It is a great game and our clan is starting to get active once again which is excellent…  now I just need to find the people to make a raid happen once more.

Diablo 3 – Switch

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A game that I totally did not expect to be putting on this list is Diablo 3 for the Nintendo Switch, but wow is this a great port of the game.  Lately this has been my go to game of choice for the Nintendo Switch and apart from some weirdness surrounding seasonal characters it is just flawless.  I had never really spent much time playing Diablo 3 on any of the consoles, even though there was a short lived experiment of me trying to play it on the Vita through Remote Play from my PS4.  At that point however Diablo 3 on console was a vastly different experience than on the PC because you lost seasons and adventure mode.  In the meantime however Blizzard has caught the software base up and as far as I can tell all versions of the game have pretty much all of the features.  Diablo 3 fits with the portability of the switch so amazingly well and allows you to drop in and kill some demons and then pop back out and get on with whatever you need to be doing.  Well worth checking out especially if you had trouble getting into Diablo as a mouse click game…  seeing as a few of the AggroChat folks latched onto this title when they never really had with the PC equivalent.

Return of the Obra Dinn – PC

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This one is extremely fresh to the list given that I played through it in a single sitting this weekend of about six hours.  Please don’t let that relatively short play time make you think that the game might not be worth every penny of its $20 price tag however.  There isn’t a whole lot I can say about this game that would not give away major plot points, however here goes the elevator pitch version.  In 1802 the Obra Dinn set sail with a sixty person crew and disappeared mysteriously…  five years later it washed up with no one still alive on board and you are an insurance adjuster for the East India Company tasked with the job of determining the fate of everyone that was on the manifest.  The trick is you are given a mystical pocket watch of sorts that allows you to see the last moments of a persons life, and through a series of these still vignettes you have to piece together what happened on the ship.  The game is essentially one giant logic puzzle, and as you go you are filling in details in a log book of sorts that asks you to determine who killed a given person and in what fashion.  All of this sounds kinda dry to this point… but once I got hooked I could not put the game down because the story it hints at is so interesting.  I guess there in lies the problem… you get hints and scraps of information instead of a cohesive narrative and are asked to draw a lot of your own conclusions…  which is sorta the thing Destiny does as well.  So if you bounce off that sort of indirect storytelling…  then it might not be for you.  For me however… I gobbled it up.

Draglia Lost – Android

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I never expected to care this much about a mobile game.  I have been a bit of a snob in that department, not really considering mobile games to be of the same value as more traditional options.  Ultimately I would download something from the play store, play it for a week… and then promptly uninstall because whatever mirth was there was gone and I didn’t have a reason to keep playing once I reached the inevitable paywall.  With Dragalia however there has been a constant drip feed of content that has kept me engaged, and they do this great thing where when one event finishes…  they give you a preview of the event that is just around the corner to keep you interested and logging in every day.  This has become my before bed activity of playing through at least enough to finish all of this games Daily quests.  When there is an event going on I focus more on grinding my way through the really fun boss fights, one of which is shown in the left most panel of the above triptych.  It also feels like I am always trying to build better element focused teams, so swapping out characters and rapidly leveling them up with items to try and keep building a better fighting force.  I am still not the biggest fan of the touch to move interface…  but once I turned off the rotate 180 degree option the movement felt more fluid and manageable.  I still would prefer to play this on the switch…  but I am more than happy to keep logging in every day on my phone as I lay in bed.

 Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

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Over the years I have dabbled in a bunch of digital card games like Hearthstone, but always found them to be lacking in one way or another.  I would play them and enjoy them on some level…  but never quite replaced Magic the Gathering in my heart.  The digital form factor works so much better for me personally as an adult than the paper one, because I just don’t have a group that I can play Magic with in the same way as I did in High School.  The other problem that I run into is that while Friday Night Magic exists… it is traditionally way more competitive than I want to be, seeing as I get a kick out of throwing together some janky decks built around a theme…  that just get plastered by anyone who is “netdecking” for efficiency.  Magic Online was a generally horrible experience because it did nothing to actually onboard the player into it…  not to mention its obtuse form of purchasing cards by talking to what is essentially an IRC Chatbot.  Arena however brings the sensibility of a digital first game like Hearthstone to my beloved Magic the Gathering and I completely love it.  I am not playing every night, but have played often enough to at least get a few rounds in every single week.  If you are or were a player of Magic the Gathering… I highly suggest you check it out because this is really the game I was waiting on all this time.  Essentially Hearthstone and all of the other related digital card games are dead to me now that the ACTUAL Magic experience exists in a user friendly form.

Night in the Woods – PC

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This game did not come out during the 2018 calendar year… but it was really important to me regardless.  As someone who grew up in a Tiny town and went through the awkward transition of being one of the few people who made it past my first semester of college…  with pretty much a good percentage of my class mates dropping out to “go back home”…  this game personally attacked me at times.  I related to the tale and the downfall of the town a bit too closely.  Sure we didn’t have a creepy abandoned flooded tram system in town, but we had our share of things that were once glorious and had fallen into complete squalor.  I also came so damned close to dropping out of college at one point during my path, and I sort of related to that as well.  This is a great game and the problem is… I am not sure it would be for anyone who had not experienced some of the things that are slantwise related to the tale that is being told.  For me…  I latched onto this game hard and it became this weirdly remixed version of my life.  For you however… it might just be a cute game with cartoon animals and a weirdly dark story thread running in the background.  I think you owe it to yourself however to see which it is for you… because for me it was bordering on life changing.

 

 

 

Games Played 2018 Edition

Over the years I have developed two habits that help me keep track of what games I am playing in a given month.  The first is that I take a lot of screenshots and archive them on network attached storage so that I can reach out and get one for this blog when I need it.  The second is that since April of 2013 I have been blogging at a minimum every weekday…  and for the first three years and some change…  every single day.  This gives me a pretty good record to know what I happened to be playing in a given stretch of time.  Years ago I used to use the Raptr gaming service to track what games I happened to be playing, but as that got sold and my game time fragmented between multiple console platforms as well… it became harder for me to get a high level view of what I happened to be doing at a given period of time.  As such I crawled back through my screenshots and my blog posts and started piecing together a map of what games I played in a given month.  Now this is not necessarily tracking the length of time played…  but instead that I played a given game during a specific month.

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This is going to look like nonsense to my viewers but this image represents the top 25 games played since May of 2012…  that I had either written or screenshot proof that I was playing at the time.  Essentially I question the reliability of this record any further back than April of 2013, but I decided to extend it out as far as I could just for sake of tracking patterns.  There are years when I play an awful lot of games… and then there are years when I don’t play many at all.  This year for example I played seventy two different games throughout the year and eight of them I played for more than five months.  On the other side of that coin 32 of the games that I played were singletons… where they were only played in a single month.  Now some of these were new games that failed to gain traction like State of Decay 2 that I had been looking forward to greatly… and others are games like Horizon Zero Dawn where I booted it back up to return briefly to a game that I had played an awful lot more in the previous year.  If you are curious enough to dig into the madness you can see the full google sheet that I maintain here.  The biggest trend you will notice is that I am one of those people that revisits old territory quite often, especially when it comes to booting up an older MMO and spending a weekend or two exploring it again.

The problem with this concept is that it is really hard to keep track of a nice clean “Top 25” list as there are ultimately a lot of games that end up being tied for the same number of months.  As such for this specific year if we set the benchmark at three months played…  because there were thirteen games that spanned two months sorta skewing the results a bit.  For games that I played three or more months however we end up with a list of twenty three games.  So as a result lets run them down.  One thing that I have done since last year is combined time played in Destiny 1 with time played in Destiny 2 since there was effectively a clean cut-over there with no real overlap.

  • Destiny/Destiny 2 – 12 Months
  • Elder Scrolls Online – 12 Months
  • Pokemon Go – 12 Months
  • Monster Hunter World – 12 Months
  • World of Warcraft – 10 Months
  • Magic the Gathering Arena – 9 Months
  • Diablo 3 – 6 Months
  • Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate – 5 Months
  • Final Fantasy XIV – 4 Months
  • Neverwinter – 4 Months
  • Dauntless – 4 Months
  • Dragalia Lost – 4 Months
  • Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr – 4 Months
  • Fallout 4 – 3 Months
  • Minecraft – 3 Months
  • The Division – 3 Months
  • No Man’s Sky – 3 Months
  • Assassin’s Creed Origins – 3 Months
  • Path of Exile – 3 Months
  • Warframe – 3 Months
  • Fallout 76 – 3 Months
  • God of War – 3 Months
  • Hollow Knight – 3 Months

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So if we look at just 2017 against 2018 there are some interesting things at work here.  Firstly mobile games played way more of a presence in my gaming diet than they have ever before with Pokemon go effectively being played at least once a month since it released in July of 2017 for a grand total of 18 months of it being on my radar.  Dragalia Lost similarly has been played every single month since release, and in many cases almost every night before I fall asleep to at a minimum do the dailies.  Another thing that happened this year was that Final Fantasy XIV seemingly feel completely off my radar with playing it only 4 months instead of the previous years 7 months.  Destiny looks a little bit weird because there were two months of overlap between the games so 2017 shows it as “14” months because I didn’t have a great way of accounting for that…  but during the last two years there has not been a month that I did not play the Destiny franchise and in truth that reaches all the way back to September of 2016 in contiguous play.  Elder Scrolls Online held way more of a presence this year as being another one of those games that I played at least once a month all year long going up from 2 months the previous year.  The real story of the year however is Monster Hunter World that sort of came out from nowhere and then was the game that I probably played the most throughout the entire year, and also inspired me to latch onto Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate when it released in August.  Similar to Destiny 2 this is a game that I started on the Playstation 4 and then moved to PC when the staggered release for it happened…  so my time accounts for leveling essentially twice.

This year also made a bunch of changes in the months played all time list, but considering how entrenched World of Warcraft is it is highly unlikely that anyone will dethrone it until I just completely quit cold turkey.  Thankfully I can create a nice clean top 15 list here so lets review the “All Time” list.

  • World of Warcraft – 57 Months
  • Final Fantasy XIV – 46 Months
  • Destiny/Destiny 2 – 45 Months
  • Rift – 39 Months
  • Elder Scrolls Online – 38 Months
  • Diablo 3 – 29 Months
  • Pokemon Go – 20 Months
  • ArcheAge – 13 Months
  • Fallout 4 – 13 Months
  • Guild Wars 2 – 13 Months
  • Wildstar – 13 Months
  • Monster Hunter World – 12 Months
  • Everquest II – 11 Months
  • Minecraft – 10 Months
  • Star Wars the Old Republic – 10 Months

This list is going to continue to shift over time, but with the selling of Trion Worlds to Gamigo… I have a feeling that ArcheAge and Rift are frozen in time and will likely not be gaining any more months played.  Similarly Wildstar has officially shuttered and it is equally frozen on the list and will eventually work its way out of the top.  Monster Hunter World and Pokemon Go are both climbing significantly and I feel like there is a good chance Destiny franchise will climb into the second place at some point in the future as I am playing it way more regularly than I am Final Fantasy XIV.  Elder Scrolls Online is going to seize the third spot early next year as well.  Diablo 3 is sort of the little engine that could and it will probably always be on the list, but the sporadic nature in which I play that game keeps it from really gaining ground.  Fallout 4 is the one that sort of shocked me… but I guess I keep returning to it much the same way as I did Fallout 3 or New Vegas before.  If you are curious you can see last years list on the Games Played 2017 Edition post.

This is largely a thing that I do for myself, but I guess the question is… does anyone find it interesting?  What games did you play the most often this year and why?  I would love to hear your answers in the comments.

Holiday Weekend Rundown

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For a good number of us this is “return to work day” and I am hoping it is finding you well.  Our holiday was a bit odd because my wife and I were realistically too sick to go to any of the family festivities.  As such we begged off on a few of the traditions until next weekend.  I used to take all of the time off between Christmas Eve and the day after New Years, but I was late getting my request in.  As such I am going to be stuck being the sole manager at work, and in truth the only voice of authority on my side of the house…  which will be interesting.  I did however take off all of next week to make up for it…  so I just need to get through the next few days.  This partial week is more or less going to be one of retrospection on the blog as I start doing the various year end activities.  This morning however I am going to talk about the various gaming related things I did over the weekend, starting with the Starlight Celebration in FFXIV…  which was adorable as usual but not really worth talking much about otherwise.

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Next up there is a holiday event running in Magic the Gathering Arena where you can play Pauper for free for a handful of prizes.  I threw together some black and green jank and immediately lost the first round, so I thought this would be a short lived event for me.  My hope was to win a single round so I could get the full art Llanowar Elves.  Instead however I went five wins after that initial loss and wound up winning a Firemind’s Research…  which is in Izzet colors and not exactly the sort of thing I play but hey…  free card and closing out the event by winning.  I need to play a few more rounds so I can stack up three more of the Llanowar Elves, but when I say it is a bunch of jank I mean it.  There is literally no discernible theme in this deck other than a bunch of cards that I for one reason or another like.

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Another thing that I did over the break was farm up a full set of the Universal Studios of Japan gear, which was available for PC players.  On the console you had to do a bunch of nonsense to get someone who had actually visited the theme park to start the queue for you.  On the PC however we could just join straight away so I got a cool set of reskinned High Rank Rathalos gear and a Rank 7 water based longsword.  Mostly these are things for the collection and while I will use Rathalos parts for mixed sets, it is going to be super rare that I actually break that sword out.

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Another thing that happened is I played through Return of the Obra Dinn from start to finish in a single sitting.  Well technically not a single sitting as I took some bathroom breaks there, but more or less played for six hours start until I beat it that night.  For the uninitiated this is a game that is attempting to feel old school… but doing a bunch of things that those elder games never could have accomplished.  The elevator pitch is that the Obra Dinn disappeared on the high seas in 1802 and mysteriously arrived in port in 1807.  You are dispatched as an insurance adjuster for the London Office of the East India Company and armed with a special pocket watch that allows you to view the last moments of a specific individuals death.  This more or less is a logic puzzle as you need to sort out the names and fates of all fifty-ish passengers, but what hooked me was the story being told through snippets… because quite frankly I wanted to learn more and just kept pushing forward.  Well worth the play through and is now going on my list for the Games of the Year AggroChat show.

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Finally I spent a ridiculous amount of time building in Minecraft because it was relaxing.  Ultimately I was watching something on History channel about ancient ruins, which prompted me to want to build in Minecraft.  That is generally how my Minecraft sessions go… I will get the urge to build something and then off I go into a project for awhile.  I am not entirely certain how this building came out the way it did…  but I started off wanting to build a giant pyramid and then decided to shift goals halfway through.  Each time I started building it sort of took a different direction and since I snapped this screenshot I have added more stuff onto it.  I did it in creative mode since I wasn’t really in the mood to mine tons of materials before I could start this sort of a project.  There are times when I will start something legit and other times like this one where I just wanted to build a thing that I had in my head.  Right now I am getting a strong urge to demolish the staircase and rebuild it as something with landings every so often.

Regardless that was my holiday break in a nutshell.  We also recorded a show along the way at some point which I have linked above.  I hope you had the best of holidays and that you don’t have to go back today.  However if you do…  our tears will keep us moisturized as we return to the salt mines.  Let me know how your holiday break went, and what cool things you did along the way!