Great Serpent of Ronka

Good Morning Friends, I must start off this post by apologizing. I probably gave some of you a heart attack yesterday when I was talking about the event to get the Regalia in FFXIV. I misread the timeline and it is in fact October 18th and not September 18th that the event finishes, giving you roughly a month instead of a week to complete it. I appreciate the reader who commented about this because I legitimately had simply glossed over that there were two different months in that statement. I’ve updated the previous post in order to hopefully keep anyone who was slow at reading it from having the same negative reaction. Another quick update is that yesterday I modified the masthead for the site, and finally after over a year have included PSO2 Belghast into the character collage. As always huge thanks to Ammosart who does most of my artwork, and that one collage represents some seven different commissions over the course of multiple years.

One of the things about this mission to level everything to 80 that has proven beneficial, is that as I adjust to each new class I learn some of its quirks. The hope is that after the experiment, I will be able to better support the unique needs of each class while I am tanking. One completely new adjustment however is how much time I have spent healing because that is more or less a role I have wholesale avoided since Everquest. There are a lot of little things that players need to know about healers in order to stop putting them in no-win situations. For example, you should never break the line of sight from your healer… especially if you are deciding that you are going to take damage. Healers cannot heal through walls and if you are out of range or in a whole other room… chances are you are going to die and that healer is going to feel like a failure as they resurrect your stupid ass.

I talked about this a bit on Twitter, but I thought it might be a good time to talk about some general theory around fight placement. I cobbled together this quick diagram to aid this discussion, but the idea is pretty straightforward. In a good scenario, the tank has pulled the boss and spun it away from the party so that frontal attacks won’t cause needless splash damage. The melee is set up either at the flank or in the rear of the boss depending on positional requirements. The healer and ranged DPS are spread out in a ring around the boss just outside of melee range so that they can run in for donut attacks or run out for any other markers, but close enough to be within splash healing range. This more or less allows the party to work efficiently, with healers doing some AOE healing while focusing on bigger heals for the tank.

However, what often happens is the bad scenario shown with the red box. Too often do I see tanks just walk up and start tanking the boss or pack of mobs in place without care for facing. This forces your melee to be back behind the encounter and vulnerable to any adds that join part way through from behind. Too often the healer has spread way the hell out and the ranged DPS is off in practically a whole other county completely out of the range of healing, and no one but the tank and melee is in the range of any splash AOE healing. Essentially my goal going into a fight is to optimize the conditions so that we have the greatest chance of succeeding and having a nice clean and swift run. Nothing slows down the party more than having to run back from a wipe because the fight mechanics that we had control over… were just carried out in a poor manner.

There are always going to be scenarios where this does not work, but it is a basic approach that works some 90% of the time. Another thing that took place yesterday, is that I managed to get the Stewards gathering beast tribe to Sworn which unlocked access to this goofy mount.

If you press the mount special button, which apparently replaces your pet hotbar… the “Serpent” springs forth from the mount and circles you before ducking back inside the jar. This is pure nonsense and is truly delightful. It reminds me a lot of the easter egg mount that springs forth a baby chocobo. You may not think it is worth leveling gathering up to Shadowbringers levels in order to get said mount, but for me it was a huge bonus of something I was already going to do.

There are many nights that I wraap up all of the activities that could give me “easy” levels pretty quickly. Traditionally this would be when I would fall into a rhythm of pushing up something through one of the Deep Dungeon systems. Last night however I apparently was restless because logged out and played a handful of other titles. The primary of these was Deathloop, which released yesterday. Prior to getting my hands on it, my initial impression based on the trailers was “What if Arkane created Bioshock but set it in the swinging 70s No One Lives For Ever visual language”. So far that more or less seems to be true.

This game is the same well crafted artistry that we have come to expect from the Dishonored series, and even some of the same visual language for set design is at play here. The device that bars your entry to your flat, reminds me a lot of the mechanism that was used to bar entry into plague ridden buildings for example. The only real problem I am having early on is that one… for some reason print screen is just straight up blocked and as a result ShareX doesn’t work for me and I have had to revert back to using F12 for Steam Screenshots. Secondly the lack of the ability to manually save your game is a real pain in the ass, and while absolutely intentional due to the gameplay… ends up just pissing me off as I have to keep repeating the same level over and over because I needed to bail for one reason or another. The idea is that you complete one entire level as a single pass, and then your gameplay state is snapshotted at the beginning of the next mission. What I want instead is just an ability to quicksave out of the game and return to that save state at a later time.

So far I am enjoying the game enough to stick with it, but am probably not going to spend much time with it until the weekend. This is absolutely the sort of game that I am going to need to carve out large chunks of time, rather than my normally fragmented gameplay. For one reason or another, during the week I seem to end up AFKing quite a bit, which is not conducive to a game that wants me to play one entire segment in a single sitting. This is one of those situations where the console players may have it easier, given that the PlayStation 5 allows you to pause a game and return to it at a later date. I feel like Arkane is going to have to patch in some sort of save game system, because right now what exists is awful and had I known about it… I might have given the game a hard pass for the time being.

Regularly Playing: April 2020 Edition

Okay folks, this is Topic Brainstorming week for Blapril 2020, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to talk about one of the things that I have traditionally done where I update you all on what I have been regularly playing. I use this opportunity as a time to update the sidebar of the blog and talk about my feelings about some of the games that are in heavy rotation. I have been exceptionally bad at keeping this updated over the last few months, but that isn’t really a new thing either because I have gone through serious lapses before. The idea is that you have a dialog with your readers and talk about what has been going on in your gaming life. This topic could be adopted to pretty much any subject, talk about movies you have been watching, music you have been listening to or any number of other hobbies.

Since this is mostly a gaming blog I have simply chosen to call that aspect of my life out, and as such I talk about the games that are new to the list, the games that are still in regular rotation and the games that are departing the list. Last edition of this feature I also included the “ships passing in the night” feature where I talk about games that I have been enjoying but that won’t really have much staying power.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 – PC

Destiny sweet Destiny… I am not sure what is going on between us. You right now are hanging by a thread and are just barely making the list. I am not sure what it is about the seasonal format but it actually disincentives me from playing, because deep down I know I won’t have the staying power to unlock everything and squeeze every last drop of good from the season before it expires. I think mostly I just have a problem with expiring content. If the seasonal content allowed me toe work through it at my own pace like something along the lines of Elder Scrolls Online, I would feel significantly better about playing Destiny on a regular basis because it doesn’t feel quite so much like wasted effort. I hope they re-evaluate the seasonal formula and make the additions to the game stick around a little longer. If they maybe give you three seasons to complete the content before it expires that might go a long way towards making this feel like a better experience.

Diablo 3 – PC and Switch

I had an awful lot of fun at the beginning of the season hanging out with Grace and Byx and have since then sorta faded away. Diablo 3 is never really far from my mind however and I am sure at some point I will finish building a reasonable set and push toward the end goal. I did at least get the 4 chapters of the seasonal journey knocked out, but Set Dungeon Mastery right now is what is holding me up because it is the one step I hate doing each season. I end up delaying it until I finally can’t anymore and now it is holding up two separate seasons journey ranks. I just really don’t like being on a timer when I am gaming.

To The New and Returning

Animal Crossing New Horizons – Switch

This is effectively my very first Animal Crossing game, and as a result there has been a mountain of knowledge that I needed to climb in very short order in order to figure out what the hell was going on behind the various mechanics. This is a game that is exceptionally bad at explaining itself, and really this should have been their “Monster Hunter World” moment, because given that the Switch is an extremely popular console makes it attractive to a whole new generation of players. This should have been the title that they added a bit more scaffolding to the game in order to hand hold you through the process of engagement. There are so many things that I have had to take to external sources to figure out, and I feel like maybe some hand holding would have been nice at least to have an option to say “Hey I am a First Timer, Explain to me like I am 5 Years Old”. All of that said it is adorable and while I am not playing with the length I was in those first few days I am at least logging in each day to move the bar forward a bit.

Atom RPG – PC

This one is making this part of the list because I feel like there is a lot more here to explore. I have not finished the game, and I want to spend time once other things calm down a bit getting back in and roaming around. Essentially this poorly named game is “What if Fallout 1 and 2 were Russian themed and came out recently”. It is a re-imagining of the Fallout genre and plays like you remember those games playing, which is to say it plays much better than they do if you were to buy a copy from GOG and play it today. It can be brutally hard, and I seem to have more issue with ammunition than I remember having back in the day, but it did serve for several fun nights of gaming and I want to return to it.

Wolcen – PC

While I have not been playing this a lot recently, there is still a lot of meat on these bones and I want to return to it. Wolcen has released a bunch of patches and tweaks since I last played and it will be interesting to see if my tanky spin to win build is still functional. Wolcen is the best Diablo game we have gotten in recent memory and does a great job of sorta cherry picking the best features of both Diablo 3 and Path of Exile… in a formula that feels closer to D3. Essentially it is a recipe for what I like in an ARPG, but I realize for the folks that hold Diablo 2 up in high esteem it might not be their jam. I wish this was available on the Switch because as much as I like playing D3 from the bedroom… if this supported cross save and allowed me to progress my character while chilling out horizontally… this would become my new sleepy time jam.

Ships Passing in the Night

Star Wars Galaxies – Legends Server – PC

In the months since January I have been on a bit of a MMORPG Emulator server binge. The first of these was Star Wars Galaxies because my good friend Tam got into the game heavily, as it was one of his nostalgia jams from the past. For him this was a great experience about space combat in the Star Wars universe. Since I do not really like flight simulators, it was less enjoyable, but I did greatly appreciate the first few levels that felt similar to a WoW or an Everquest 2. Unfortunately once you have finished the first ten levels and the game opens up… this helpful scaffolding falls away and the “real” game was far less enjoyable for me. What was there instead was slow progression and the unpredictable difficulty curves that I remember from Everquest. I was happy that Tam was having so much fun, but I was a bit saddened that I really was not.

City of Heroes – Homecoming Server – PC

This lead me down a path towards one of my nostalgic remembrances… and the game I was likely playing while Tam was playing SWG… City of Heroes. I had so much fun with this game and for the full nostalgia trip, I opted to play a Katana/Regeneration Scrapper. The game itself was way different than I remember it being, but not in a bad way. The homecoming server effectively is picking up where the game left off when it was shuttered, meaning it is several years worth of patches past the point at which I actually left off playing. For the most part the game holds up well unlike SWG or Everquest, and I could see myself maybe returning to it at some point in the future when I am not deluged with other games I want to be playing.

Everquest – EZ Server – PC

Eventually this path of madness lead me back to the progenitor of MMORPG gaming (for me at least), Everquest. I tried a few different server options and eventually landed on EZ Server, which is a super fast progression and super low difficulty Everquest experience that lets me play tourist and revisit areas I loved in the game without having to deal with finding a group. I realize this largely defeats the purpose of Everquest, but I also don’t have the time or patience that I did when I first played this game, and as a result I am down for cheat mode. It was a lot of fun for about a week and then I wandered away like a bored toddler. I might return the next time I get nostalgic about Norrath, given how hard I have found it to ease back into Everquest II.

Mars: War Logs – PC

This is the third game by Spiders that I have played and it suffers from a lot of the same problems. However still like Greedfall and Technomancer there is something about the gameplay that I find compelling. They all sorta play like low rent Bioware titles, but they are doing a thing that Bioware no longer seems to be doing which makes me interested in them nonetheless. Mars: War Logs was the first game in a series that continued with Technomancer, and I could definitely see some merit in playing this game first because it does introduce parts of the Mars setting that never get explored fully in the sequel. That said it is a much more primitive gaming experience, and while I enjoyed it I could see a lot of the awkwardness turning others off. If you want to experience a spiders game and have never done so… probably start with Greedfall and see if it leaves you wanting more before diving in deeper.

The Touryst – Switch

This game was in heavy rotation for me for about a week and then once again as is my usual I wandered away like a bored toddler. It is really charming and interesting, and I liked the pace of feeling like I accomplished something each day. What I did not love about it were how many precision jumps that were required to complete some of the puzzles. The basics of the game is that you are visiting an archipelago and each island has a different them, as well as a central puzzle to solve in how to unlock its shrine. There is no real combat, and if you fail something you start over immediately at the beginning of the room that you are in so it allows you to fail fast and rapidly iterate through ideas. The voxel theme is a lot of what makes the game charming, and the engine that is running it is among the more impressive ones available on the switch. The lighting, the animations, the subtle details all add to the feel of it being a living and breathing world.

Doom (2016) – PC

It only took me four years… but I finally buckled down and finished my play through of Doom 2016 in anticipation of the release of Doom Eternal. It was a fun if nonsensical ride through a world of exploding demon corpses. I had an awful lot of fun pushing through the final bits of the game and would definitely suggest it to anyone who loved the earlier era and arcade shooters. I’ve not really had a chance to dig into Doom Eternal but it also seems to be a similar style of enjoyment. Right now I am buried under a bunch of games and I need to dig out before I really tackle anything else.

World of Warcraft – Retail – PC

During the crisis we currently find ourselves in… I’ve struggled to allow myself to sink into the warm embrace of a video game. I’ve had trouble disconnecting mentally enough to really allow myself to engage fully with another universe. As a result I have been in desperate need of something that I could more or less play while at the same time shutting off my brain and just giving it time to rest. World of Warcraft fits that bill perfectly because all of the patterns of engagement are more or less muscle memory at this point. I’ve been taking advantage of the experience bonus currently going on in game and the speed of leveling is pure nonsense. I took my Horde Paladin from 110-120 in a few days and hit 118 before I had finished the first zone I chose to go through, Zuldazar. Now that I have that character at 120 I am swapping over to pushing up my Warlock, while at the same time dipping my head in periodically to gobble up any upgrades from World Quests. I’ve also leveled my Paladin on Alliance side as well, since it was the closest to the level cap… and am in the process of working my way towards unlocking the allied races.

Summary

When I allow myself to go more than one month without an update it ends up being this mammoth post as I have a bunch of things that I feel like I need to talk about. My hope is that I can get back in the swing of doing these early in each month. I find it helpful to sorta clear the slate each month and talk about what is and is not seeing play time. There are a lot of games that I might play, but ultimately don’t feel like dedicating one of my daily posts to, and this gives me the space to address those.

Interesting Times

There is an ancient “curse” that reads “may you live in interesting times”. I feel like right now at this moment we are all living in interesting times regardless if we want to. This has been a bizarre week, and comes on the tail of several bizarre weeks. In a Pinball machine there is an anti-cheating mechanism designed to lock down the controls if you push it off axis just a little too much and cause a plumb bob to bang against its housing. This is referred to as tilting the machine, and I feel like at some point on Thursday I officially entered the tilt state as a human being and am more or less just operating on instinct. As a technologist I often times think of my own internal processes as though they were that of a machine, because in some way it makes me feel like I have more control over them than I actually do.

Video games are a large part of my coping mechanism for stress. I often want to dig into some other world or setting as a way of resetting my brain back to healthy parameters. However when too much stress builds up too quickly I find myself in this restless state where nothing seems to be soothing. I am officially in that state as I flit between activities desperately trying to find something to bring some semblance of solace to my mind. Last night I spent some time playing Doom 2016, because I never actually managed to beat that game before careening off like a bored toddler into some other thing that caught my attention. The jury is out if it actually helped because I woke up this morning feeling just as frazzled as I was before heading to bed and I know I was up several times during the night tossing and turning and struggling with temperature regulation.

Starting around the 26th of February I started fighting a case of Influenza A that was thankfully tested and classified as that. However I took the advice of shelter and self care and as a result I was too late for antivirals meaning that I got the full brunt. I had a Flu Shot but got the trivalent version that my workplace was offering, and my wife later got the quadrivalent version that Walgreens had. Apparently the strain I got was the one covered under the one she received because she never actually managed to catch it which is a blessing. However while I am in recovery mode still and taking a course of steroids to attempt to clear out my lungs, we have also been dealing with the ramping up of concern and reaction to Covid19.

I won’t lie I am concerned about this virus, largely because when the news talks about about the people this sort of thing effects the worst… I am in that category. I have severe respiratory problems and have had my entire life. When you combine that with the fact that I have a less than fully functioning immune system due to some IgG deficiencies you end up with a recipe for me having a really bad time if I catch this thing. I am trying desperately not to let this fear control me, but it is nonetheless a thing. I am one of those people that seems to catch everything that happens to be going around, and I feel like it is just a matter of time before I myself get infected. I feel like I keep wanting to tell everyone that I love them… just in case something goes south because I am riding that line between understandable concern and sheer panic way too much of the day.

On one level it seems strange to be coming home and pushing my brain into another world… especially one as violent as Doom. However for me I guess it is a way of not being me for awhile and going into a setting with clearly defined rules that I can manipulate and bend to my will. It is a way of me getting back some control when I am feeling like I have none. I am a very information based person and the lack of what it seems like good solid verified information is ultimately the thing that pushes me into a state of panic the most. The fact checkers of the world are in a state of overload and too much information is flowing out through less than reliable sources that make for a very challenging time to decide what you can actually trust. So instead I keep looking for shelter for the night in the form of a game, because the day will always mean a return to the logistics of the world and the weariness that it brings.

Games of the Decade: 2016

World of Warcraft: Legion – PC

We continue this morning towards the trajectory of recounting the games that were especially important to me over the last decade. Yesterday I stated that I had been trying to avoid talking about expansions and DLC… and now this morning I am going to break that guideline and include an expansion. I guess that is the good thing about this being a very personal list and not some attempt at a “greatest ever” concept, because I can make the rules as malleable as I like. All of these games feel very fresh in my memory as though I could have played them yesterday.

Doom (2016)

Doom (2016) – PC

I somewhat hate that they titled this game the same as the game that came out in the 90s… because it forever means that we are going to be stuck putting a year in parenthesis behind it. However on another level it absolutely makes sense. This game is effectively a re-imagining of the original game and bringing it up to modern fidelity. It feels like a game that is a throwback to an older era of visceral shooters that were fast paced and twitchy. It also adapts the style of the game to include much needed breaks in the action allowing you to catch your breath and collect any power-ups that might be laying around before charging head first into another furious wave of combat. This was one of the things I loved about the Painkiller series, and it is nice seeing the originator cherry picking some of the best features of those who ultimately copied it.

Final Fantasy XV

Final Fantasy XV – PS4

I will admit when I first saw the concept of this game I viewed it with some serious side-eye. I was not sure how I would feel about what looked to be a boy band on a road trip. The end result however is charming as hell and one of the most unexpectedly touching games I played during this year. I was not sure what the future of Final Fantasy would be, but I never quite expected an ode to Route 66 roadside towns. Having lived my entire life near the “mother road”, there is so much of this game that resonates with me and they somehow managed to capture so many aspects of it perfect… albeit filtered through a Japanese lens. What I found the most compelling however was the combat and how it still very much felt like a Final Fantasy game while remaining fully action based. I need to spend some time and finish this game up and play through all of the side content that I missed.

The Division – PC

The Division is a rollercoaster of emotions and feelings, not all of which are positive. I latched onto this game hard when it came out and pretty much dedicated every waking moment to exploring it. The narrative it presented was infectious and I gobbled up every bit of lore I could get my hands on about how exactly the fall happened. I personally found it to have some pacing issues as you got higher in level, and not having a stable group was a major detriment to my long term stability in the title. Soloing the content felt amazing at first but eventually became way more challenging since I am not naturally drawn to cover shooters. I kept wanting to try and play this like my beloved Destiny, with a run and gun nature… but was thoroughly punished for it. Regardless of all of this it still carved out a very important place in this very packed year of games and deserves its space on the list.

Pokemon Go – Android

This is the year that Pokemon Go became a phenomena and people absolutely lost their shit. This also represents the very first time that a mobile game mattered to me. Up until this point I had downloaded and installed very few games on my mobile phone. The interface never felt compelling to me and it always seemed like a worse version of a game genre on either a hand held or console. Pokemon Go was an entirely new type of game-play that only worked on mobile connected devices, and I took wandered outside of my house at night looking for the illusive creatures. The biggest problem I have had with the game is that if you are in Rural areas or the Suburbs, your game-play experience is not amazing. You have to go places to be able to play, because still to this day I can go for a walk around my neighborhood and only encounter a half dozen critters. whereas if I do the same thing in the downtown Tulsa are I work I am constantly coming across new and interesting things. It has earned its place on my list because I still to this day keep popping it open when I am in a new place to see what I might encounter.

World of Warcraft: Legion

World of Warcraft: Legion – PC

Up until 2016, had you asked me what my favorite World of Warcraft expansion was, I would have predictably said Wrath of the Lich King. In many ways I considered that to be the pinnacle of the WoW experience and everything since that point has more or less been a downhill slide with occasional plateaus. Legion was an expansion that I didn’t expect much from because quite honestly it seemed like a bunch of elements left on the cutting room floor from other expansion ideas. However what it wound up being was a complete and total revitalization for World of Warcraft that I greatly miss. Battle for Azeroth has been a disappointment in every possible way, and I think that has been all the more apparent because of the unexpected greatness that was this expansion. My hope is that Shadowlands brings us back to this era of the game and I can wholeheartedly love it again.