Regularly Playing: June 2019 Edition

For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog. I failed miserably at the last incarnation, because the side bar never actually got updated. Additionally May was a crazy month with all of the weather issues and I never quite got one of these done. Instead I am shifting to a June edition where I attempt to start doing these towards the start of the month instead of the end of the month. I seemingly inhaled my coffee this morning so… lets do this!

To Those Remaining

Dragalia Lost – Android

I continue to truck along happily in Dragalia Lost and especially now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 there is rarely a night that goes by that I don’t at a minimum play through my dailies. I’ve said this before but there is a release cadence of content that keeps me engaged and the fact that another character summon is just around the corner. The whole summoning process feels much better than that Wyrmprints have been completely removed from the mix. After playing effectively the entire time I have gathered up a good stable of five star characters that I have not even bothered leveling yet. I still sorta wish there was a switch version.

Diablo 3 – PC and Switch

If you have read the blog over the last few days you will know that I am fully engaged with Diablo 3 right now. Last night I attempted to farm some more chests but sleep claimed me. I am however on a mission to get the Avarice Conquest and will get there sooner or later. I love Diablo 3 so much and while I fade in and out of its focus… I will always sooner or later return to it.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

While I am not playing a ton of it… I am still very much engaged with Final Fantasy XIV and am looking forward to the upcoming head start on June 28th for Shadowbringers the next expansion. Pretty excited especially considering the drastic class changes that I think will lead to a more accessible environment. Right now the plan is to level the Samurai through the story quests and then level Warrior with Dungeon Finder given that Tank queues are a breeze. I’ve always done it the other way around and I think a lot of what leads to my burn out is trying to claw my way up to level as a DPS when I could simply go the easy route and level through the story.

Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

While I am not playing it a ton I am still fairly engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena and the War of the Spark expansion seems to be pretty interesting. We talked a bit about this on the podcast but I am really wishing they would make it so that constructed is a format that is always available for play, given that is probably my favorite of the “event” types. It also serves as an amazing way to obtain cards from a specific set.

To The New and Returning

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC

I did a lengthy post about this the other day but I am starting to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is as close as we will probably ever get to a proper Symphony of the Night sequel. While I only have the E3 demo version right now, I will be getting access to the full thing on my birthday… June 18th and plan on picking it up for pretty much every console that it will be available for. It is likely going to be a toss up between Switch and PC as to which version I actually play the most.

Destiny 2 – PC

With the Season of Opulence starting I believe today… I’ve been poking my head back into Destiny 2 of late to try and reacquaint myself with the way that the game as a whole feels. I completely missed the Season of the Drifter because I was off doing other things, and the start of a new Season seems to be a good time to get engaged again. I still very much love the game but at this point am so far behind that I am not exactly sure what the most ideal catch up mechanic would be. This is the problem with Destiny as a whole is that there isn’t a painfully obvious way to gain a ton of light levels quickly.

The Elder Scrolls Online – PC

I’ve also of late been spending a significant amount of time playing Elder Scrolls Online. A new expansion released and it has made me want to start playing again… in spite of not actually being willing to start the new content. Instead I am working my way through Vvardenfell… aka two expansions ago? The game is pretty great and ends up filling the same niche that Star Wars the Old Republic does… in that I mostly want to come in and gobble up a bunch of story content and then wander off.

To Those Departing

Grim Dawn

I know I will revisit this game again, but for now I am not playing it and it leaves the list. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have stopped playing sometime mid April. Still a really great game and I expect to get the itch at some point in the near future… but being engaged with Diablo 3 again mostly pushed it off the table.

Marvel Future Fight

I played this a significant amount of time for a short period of time… and now find it really hard to get back into it. I feel like I hit the free to play wall where I have done as much of the content as I want to do before needing to spend a significant chunk of money. The grind set in and all of the things that would offer advancement require either a lot of money or a lot of time.

Mortal Kombat 11

Going forward I am going to try to filter titles like this off the list in part because there are a lot of things that I play furiously for a weekend and then never play again. Mortal Kombat 11 was one of these and while I fully expect to return to it periodically it isn’t really worthy of the moniker of “regularly playing”. Its still a really cool game and you should check it out especially when it goes on sale.

Outward

This again is another example of a game that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the list since I played it obsessively for a few nights and then never again. I’m going to start an honorable mentions section below for some of the games where I play in this manner because I have a few of them this month as well.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I came in… I gobbled up the entire Eternal Throne storyline and then wandered off once I started the content immediately following that. I have no clue why I suddenly stopped playing but I did. I expect honestly at some point soon to add this back to the list especially with a new full expansion on the way. I still really like this game and am happy it found its feet post launch. I would love more of the content along the lines of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne because both were phenomenal.

Honorable Mentions

Again for those who didn’t read all of the blurbs above, this is a section I am adding in part because every month there are a handful of titles that I play furiously for a few days and then wander away from. They don’t really deserve the title of “regularly playing” but they are also worth noting.

Crowfall – PC

While there is actually a game here I am not entirely certain if it is a game I want to play. This is something I have been poking my head in to check on since the backer alpha began. I had a few fun nights with it but more or less have consigned it to hibernation once again.

Dragon’s Dogma – PC

I have no clue how much of this I will be playing. I randomly installed it and started playing a few weekends back after watching a series of videos on it by Gaijin Hunter. It is a really cool game and I think it might be something that I could settle into as a bizarre “what if capcom had made skyrim” experience. Not quite ready to add it to the regularly playing list, will see if it returns by the end of the month.

Rage 2 – PC

I had a lot of fun with this game right around the time of launch and then I wandered away… and am not exactly sure why? I really need to get back to playing it and at least make my way through the main story. I get easily distracted when it comes to gaming and I am guessing me getting into World of Warcraft Classic beta was the shiny object that caused this one.

World of Warcraft Classic – PC

And… last but definitely not least… we have World of Warcraft Classic the aforementioned shiny object. This is coming in as an honorable mention and not a regularly playing in part because I have forcefully pulled myself away from it. This game launches officially in August and given the amount of time you need to spend leveling in this game… I don’t see a point in burning myself out before that point. We are completely nonsense and are going to be making an attempt at 40 player raiding again. I will give more information about this as time gets closer. However for now it claims a spot on the Honorable Mentions.

Mortal Kombat 11 – Early Thoughts

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Yesterday Mortal Kombat 11 released and I spent some time last night playing it.  Warning there will likely be spoiler information included in this post, but seeing as I have not gotten terribly deep into the game it won’t be very complete.  One thing you need to understand about my psyche is that I was a fighting game arcade rat.  During my High School years the world was having its renaissance of fighting games that began with the release of Street Fighter 2 and continued through until the franchises evolved into 3D and the arcade construct as a whole eventually petered out after my college years.  That time however was one of mystery filled with random messages scrawled on the proto-internet message boards like those of CompuServe and AOL and a heaping dose of misinformation.  I still remember the day my local arcade… and by local I mean one thirty minutes away from my house…  got one of the beta boards for Mortal Kombat II.  It had a limited set of characters and only a handful of fatalities introduced in the game…  but we hungrily devoured what content it did have trading home made guides with each other to try and level the playing field.

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From the very beginning I found myself drawn to the lore of this world and its weird inhabitants.  Mortal Kombat 1 was a fairly dry game that was more or less a straight rip off of Enter the Dragon.  With the second installment in the franchise they expanded this lore to include the Outland a realm which the Earth Realm was in a constant struggle for domination.  Only through the rules of the tournament were we the players able to keep this other realm at bay and from invading our own.  Then with the third installment of the game…  we learn that unlike the first tournament…  we didn’t actually win.  This was crazy for me to wrap my head around at the time…  because here was a game that was telling a narrative through a fighting game that had both an official canon that was different from that of the player “heroes journey”.  It was always trying to do something really unique and cinematic with its storytelling that other fighting games at the time were not, and I appreciated that.  However as my personal tastes changed I found myself exiting the Fighting Game genre and moving on with my life… eventually getting engrossed in MMORPGs.  There was something however about what I had been seeing surrounding Mortal Kombat 11 that made me want to pick the game back up and see what the story mode was like.

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Time has passed and a new generation of characters is effectively taking the place of some of the names I recognized.  The long canon relationship between Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade apparently bore fruit in the form of a daughter named Cassie.  Similarly we are introduced to the daughter of Jackson Briggs (Jax) named Jaqui who happens to serve in the same defense force unit as Cassie under the command of Sonya.  The opening scenes of the game revolve around the family connection and how in order to get her promotion to Commander…  Cassie has to defeat Sonya in combat.  Then bam…  we are immediately and seamlessly transitioning into the fighting game with no real pause…  the camera rotates and the familiar 2Dish playing field is presented with the combat bars overhead.  The game controls pretty much like I would expect a Mortal Kombat game to control and before long I was able to pick up some of the basic muscle memory of how to do this thing.  Cassie more or less controls like Johnny Cage…  with some tweaks here or there that make it more an amalgam of both Cage and Sonya’s move set.

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What I found most odd about this whole experience is how once you get started you are largely on rails and working your way through a story sequence without any pauses.  Eventually I needed to go do something else for the night…  and it was awkward to find a natural place to break off  the game.  I am guessing the story sequences will pick up where I left off as I get pushed into the next fight.  I made it through the opening sequence which involved a strike on Kitana’s Castle in the outland…  where both her and Liu Kang have apparently been corrupted by Shinnok…  a perennial baddie in the series since Sub Zero Mythologies and natural foil to our own protective Elder God Raiden.  I feel like there is a ton of story here that I have missed over the years… and while I own Mortal Kombat X because I got it as part of another package I never really cracked it open and played it to see how its story worked out.  In theory this first mission was to stave off an invasion of Earth from the Outland…  but not everything goes entirely as planned.

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Raiden is not the person we knew, because he too seemingly is being corrupted by the influence of Shinnok.  You can see he is wearing Shinnok’s amulet around his neck…  but his eyes and lightning attacks now glow red as opposed to the usual blue.  That’s right…  Raiden has fallen to the dark side and is now a Sith…  or something like that.  He still seems to be dead set on protecting the Earth Realm…  but is way more harsh than the Raiden I remember.  The team escapes from Outland back to Earth only to have another player peek her head onto the stage.  We are introduced to Kronika the Keeper of Time who is tired of Raiden’s corruption of the timeline and probably pissed at him beheading Shinnok her apparent child.  So some timey wimey stuff happens and suddenly we have a mix of timelines where characters from Mortal Kombat 1, 2, 3, and other games that I don’t recognize get blended together into one amalgam timeline that allows quite simply for us to play all the things in a single game without having to care much about why.  Most time travel storylines are complete nonsense and bullshit… and I sorta expect this one to end up that way in the end.  However for the moment I am engaged…  but cannot play for long because my muscle memory for a fighting game ain’t exactly what it used to be… and my hand got to hurting after a handful of fights.

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Other random observations…  I never liked Johnny Cage.  He always annoyed me as the consummate incarnation of a dudebro and the rich kid bully “Blaine” character from every 80s teen movie.  You take his same actions and place it in a female character and it is insanely way the hell more tolerable…  so I kinda like Cassie Cage so far.  Jaqui seems an awful lot like her father Jax…  so there is a weird mirror of some of the same dynamics I remember between Jax and Sonya before.  So you get this whole feeling of getting the band back together…  but the band performers are the children of the previous generation.  Based on this game and what footage I have seen of the Injustice series…  NetherRealm Studios seems to have perfected the art of telling a story through a fighting game.  I look forward to making it through the story mode, but I am honestly doubtful that I will ever play this in any sort of a mode that allows the game to go online with other players.  My days of slapping a quarter on the monitor to reserve the next game are well past me…  and I doubt I would come anywhere close to enjoying playing random strangers on the internet.  I do however appreciate a good story told through a vehicle that I enjoy playing…  so this might cause me to go on a renaissance of playing other NetherRealm fighting games to experience more of it.

All in all… I am digging it heavily.  The game is getting panned hard by critics due to the inclusion of micro-transactions but I have not gotten anywhere near enough into the game to be able to judge that.  They are claiming that the game gains currency to unlock things from the “Krypt” very slowly…  but I also remember sitting in our RV at the lake grinding the same tower over and over to unlock randomized coins in Mortal Kombat Deception on the PS2…  which incidentally is probably the last MK game I heavily played.  The coins did not come quickly and it find super grindy to get unlocks…  so I am guessing this game is going to feel very similar.  Those are vehicles for folks to invest more time in the game…  not necessarily for casual players like myself.  There is a really cool customization system that lets you swap out appearances and abilities on various characters which seems like it might be a cool idea…  so that your sub zero might perform slightly different to that of your friends adding a bit of the whole MOBA character design into the mix.  I cannot however gauge how that will work out in the end, because I am just a tiny bit into the game right now.