It is not a great morning. I am suffering from what I sometimes refer to as “intestinal panic” and have been since last night. As a result I am little out of it and also did not get amazing sleep which has caused me to stare blankly into the void several times this morning instead of writing a post. Yesterday I found out that a round of mass banning went out in TemTem and for whatever reason I always get paranoid when something like that happens. To the best of my knowledge I have not done anything to warrant a ban, but given that there is usually no recourse it always makes me more than a little paranoid. This time around specifically because the company seems to think that maybe they accidentally banned a few people. Thankfully however I was able to log in just fine and thankfully this time around Crema is accepting appeals. However posts like this one will always serve to make me extra paranoid about random bans.
I continue to push forward in The Technomancer and while I thought I was getting close to the end… I realize that I have yet to finish chapter three of the game because I don’t have that achievement, and that there is also apparently a chapter four achievement. I may just not be able to tell at all where I am in the pacing unless the final chapter is super short. Last night I mostly spent my time working on a plan to disgrace my arch nemesis, which to be honest… I still don’t quite understand why he is chasing me in the manner that he is. That is a finer point that I have yet to figure out, and I am hoping that eventually as I wind my way further down this rabbit hole that it is explained. I am apparently the chosen one without actually having explained why anything about me makes me the chosen one.
There are two things that this game needs badly. The first is a way to skip time without having to find a bed, because unlike the Fallout/Elder Scrolls games beds are in fairly short supply in this world. The second thing is some sort of a fast travel system because I have retread the same steps to the point of madness. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Spiders made the design decision that encounters would respawn frequently, which means each time that I trek through the slums I have to fight the same guards and the same gates over and over. The game suffers from a significant amount of backtracking because new quests will send you to the same destinations you have been to hundreds of times, and will again force you to fight the same encounters. This is definitely something they seem to have learned from this game because Greedfall had a perfectly adequate fast travel system.
In Josie news, she has entered the phase where she is into everything. She has explored her environment enough to be comfortable with going places she shouldn’t go now. I woke up this morning and she had knocked a ton of stuff off the top of one of the dressers because of course she did. We are reaching a point of equilibrium with the cats, or at least Mollie is starting to settle down. She has always been our high strung baby, and as I said yesterday over twitter she has now adopted the upstairs cat toy and Josie has adopted the downstairs one. Last night was the first time since Josie coming home with us that Mollie snuggled properly, which I am hoping is a good sign. In fact for most of the night I had Kenzie snuggling on the blanket draping my legs, Mollie laying over my mouse arm and Josie sprawled out behind my head on the top of the sectional. This absolutely seems like progress.
For those who have read this blog for awhile, you will know that I have this semi-monthly column in which I talk about the games I have been playing regularly and also use this as an excuse to update my blog’s sidebar. The fourth quarter of 2019 was not a good time for regular updates to this because I failed to do one in October and also completely failed to do one in December. With the new year I am hoping to get back on track and keep these, but I have to warn you… today is going to be a bloodbath. Many games are being dropped from the list because quite honestly some of my gaming patterns have changed drastically over the last few months.
To Those Remaining
Destiny 2 – PC
Destiny 2 represents one of only a few games that I am regularly playing that would classify as an endless game. I’ve had a shift away from Massively Multiplayer Online gaming towards more finite single player titles of late, and as such those evergreen games that I always spent time in have suffered greatly. I’ve come to realize that I had not really finished many games because I always wound up getting distracted by the online fare, and if I instead ignore them I find I actually do enjoy polishing games off. Destiny 2 however is near and dear to my heart and is the sort of thing that I can return to over and over again for short bursts. While I am sure that I am making Thalen sad for not playing much, I have missed out on a bunch of things and am mostly okay with that. I do want to finish the seasonal grind at some point but I have 40 some days to do that.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
Diablo 3 is another one of those games that is so much part of my core identity that I am not sure if there will truly ever be a period of time when I am not at least idly playing it. Since the time of last posting I completely finished the PC Seasonal Content as a Demon Hunter and made it up through Slayer on the Switch with a Whirlwind Barbarian. The Switch is excellent for grinding a bit from bed before falling asleep, but even of late I have been opting out of that for a few reasons that I will get into later. With the talk of Diablo 4 on the horizon and the conversion of Torchlight Frontiers to Torchlight III, I still find myself extremely connected to this now aging game. I’ve just not found an adequate replacement to truly scratch the same action rpg ich.
To The New and Returning
Here is where the sad bits come in… there really isn’t anything new to be adding to this list. I have played several games but none of them are the sort of things that I expect to be adding to the list in any sort of a permanent manner. Instead I think I am going to implement a new feature called “Ships Passing in the Night” where I talk about some of the games that I had short but intense interactions with, but feel the chapter is either closed or will be closed once I complete them.
Ships Passing in The Night
The Witcher 3 – PC
I have so much love for this game, and while I fully expect to go back and play it at some point I am effectively done with it for the moment. For years I found this game incomprehensible in the way it sorta just drops you in the middle of everything with limited explanation. It was only through watching the Netflix Witcher series that I was able to gain proper purchase and glean enough information to make me feel firmly planted in this games universe. Since then I have been on a tear of playing through everything I could stand from the Witcher games and even reading the novels. The first Witcher will likely always be an impassable wall for me, but I have accepted it. This third game however goes on the top games of all time list for me personally.
The Witcher 2 – PC
After playing through the first Witcher game I had so many unanswered questions, and as a result I opted to do things backwards and go back searching for the answers in Witcher 2. While it was a bit of a struggle to get used to the interface, I eventually mastered it and had a phenomenal time doing what was effectively a golden path play-through of the non-human side of the story. I even was engaged enough to restart and try playing through the human side, only to determine that I had absolutely made the correct choice the first time around and wander away like a bored toddler. This game is always going to have a soft spot in my heart, but it is a deeply flawed experience, but one worth experiencing. Unfortunately I realized too lately that the answers to all of my questions lie in the books and not the past video games.
Greedfall – PC
Another flawed but phenomenal gameplay experience is that of Greedfall. It is a game that is tackling some themes that I have never quite seen a game tackle, which are really spending time exploring the sins of the colonial era. While there are some weird things going on at times with the interface and with combat, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience playing this game and as a result it has caused me to be interested in a deep dive of the developers back catalog of games. If you love the Bioware style of games you might legitimately be interested in exploring the games from french developer Spiders.
The Technomancer – PC
This is the second game I have played by Spiders and I am enthralled. This is currently my gaming main squeeze, at least until I finish it and It is a thoroughly interesting experience. The game is set in a post colonial Mars where it is ruled by rival corporations and military powers that end up creating a pretty damned oppressive environment. That said the game threw me a massive curve ball yesterday and opened up considerably and I am so there for the long ride. Imagine a setting that blends Blade Runner, Dune, Total Recall and the Red Faction games with a dash of Fallout into a single setting. I actually am enjoying the combat in Technomancer way more than I did Greedfall, and I am curious what things are going to be like if I keep going backwards in the Spiders catalog.
TemTem – PC
It is possible that this game might make it to regularly playing status, but for now I am throwing it in this category because I am just not sure. It is a Not-Pokemon MMORPG and it is charming as hell and does a really good job of both mirroring the best parts of Pokemon and bringing new things to the genre. The only thing that I find lacking is there is no xp sharing system and you legitimately have to fight with your not-pokemon to level them instead of doing what I do and just dragging them along for the ride. I’ve only played a few hours on this latest build even though I was a backer and have played various builds along the way. Time will tell if this becomes something more serious for me or not.
To Those Departing
Dragalia Lost – Android
Sorry Dragalia… you had a really good run but there are two things that happened. Firstly the gameplay finally reached its point where it became repetitive to a fault. Secondly I have been trying to read more often and as such that time when I was spending playing Dragalia Lost got replaced with time in the Kindle app. I am not the type of player that ever opts to play a mobile game if I have access to other options, so once it lots its prime real estate for bedtime gaming it really dropped off my radar. I am happier to be reading each night than to be spending time in a repetitive grind that doesn’t really go anywhere.
The Outer Worlds – PC
Sorry Boo, it’s me not you. This is a game I expect to return to and finish up, but in truth it is one of those things that should have graced the new category and not really added as a regularly playing. I’m somewhere around halfway done with the game and I figure when I deplete my current run of bioware-like games I fully expect to dust this off and finish it up. I love the game lots, but just have not been playing it.
World of Warcraft Classic – PC
It just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I can’t fully explain it, but after the absence when I was frustrated with Blizzard over the Hong Kong thing… I found it impossible to get reconnected and actively start playing again. Someone let the magical blue smoke escape and it just doesn’t do much of anything for me right now. I am for whatever reason in the wrong mind state to be enjoying it and as such it leaves list.
World of Warcraft Retail – PC
While I know without a doubt that I will be back and playing Shadowlands… for the moment I have zero interest in anything going on in this game. It is sad because I dearly love my Facepull family, but for now at least I am loving them from a distance. There is just something about World of Warcraft at the moment that I find a massive turn off, because I have tried to log in a few times but jettison in a perpendicular trajectory really quickly. Battle for Azeroth really did ruin the game for me, and I guess I hope it is not a permanent condition because I still have fond memories of how much I enjoyed Legion.
Summary
So there we have it, like I said it is a bit of a bloodbath because I have whittled down the regularly playing list to two titles. I am pretty sure this is the smallest it has ever been since the implementation of it. For now I am very much on a kick of not playing MMORPGs, but time will tell how long that will actually last.
Lets be truthful at this point. You are not coming here for my writing anymore, but instead updates tales of a tiny furry butt that now officially inhabits my household. Yesterday did not exactly go as planned, because when we went to visit on Monday they told us that it was within the realm of possibility that we might get a call yesterday to pick miss Josie up. We have officially named her Josie the Pussycat and I guess in my mind I didn’t want to finish the prep work for fear of jinxing it. Just shy of 4 pm I got a phone call from the vet that works with the Animal Shelter and by 4:30 I was jetting out of downtown to head over there to get her. We have kept the pet carrier in the car at the ready for the last several days as a sort of weird “go bag” for when the event finally happened.
Luckily my wife was able to bail a little early and get home before me to finish putting litter in the litter box and setting out food and water and such. We were 98% there on setting up the isolation room we had planned, but the best laid plans often times go off the rails. Our upstairs bathroom is meant to be the master suite bathroom for the house and because of all of the extra space that is where we keep a row of litter boxes. Off of that room is a separate fully enclosed tub with a sitting bench and our master plan was to quarantine her off into that room. We had it all made up with a cat bed, a scratching post, a bunch of toys and of course a food and water dish. She did not like this room however and anytime we left it… she screamed her head off.
So that plan lasted all of five minutes and instead we regrouped and went with the ole tried and true. Every cat we have taken home has spent time in my wife’s office and as a result we now have another kitty suite set up in there. My wife of course spent the entire evening up there with her and she is already chill as hell. She does not seem to notice she had surgery because at one point she full leaped off of my shoulder before I could stop her. This morning she was curled up in the cat bed completely conked out and once I finish writing this post I am going to go in there and hang for a bit while my car warms up. I think she already realizes she is at home, and my hope is that we can introduce her into the wider house before very long. At the moment Kenzie is being a butt about it, but she is kinda a butt about everything. I am not getting to spend much time with Josie because I more or less need to be a stable force for Kenzie to rotate around out in the rest of the house. My wife will also be out of the country in a week or so and as a result probably needs to get in as much bonding time as possible in the short term.
My original plan for the evening was to hang out and play some TemTem, the not-Pokemon MMORPG. That however didn’t exactly go as planned. I was one of the backers of the game on Kickstarter and have played before when it was in stress test mode. I figured I would calmly slide in and start playing last night but when the login screen announced that I was in an over 9000 player queue, I figured it was probably not going to bode well. I did however manage to create a character and the only thing wrong with the character screen is the lack of beard options. Granted you are playing a child character… but I can dream of having a beard.
There were however opening day jitters as the game more or less was unplayable. During the time in the Tutorial area there were massive pauses between loading screens. Once I entered the open world however and encountered my first random TemTem… the game just straight up froze on me. Fifteen minutes later I abandoned hope and Alt+F4’d out of the game and went on with my night. They apparently posted about these issues, and were looking into resolving them. I am guessing they are using a peer to peer scheme and were blaming the issues on some players slow or unresponsive connections.
Okay, we should go to sleep now.
Game is mostly stable. We will be pushing fixes later in the day to improve everything.
Thank you all so much for bearing with us. Love you to the moon and back.
If you want to help us and you have time, don't forget to post a review on Steam!
I have to give them credit because based on their Twitter feed it seems like they were furiously stomping bugs all night long and finally crashed out about 3 am my time. Considering that Tem Tem is developed by a Studio in Madrid Spain that means they signed off at 10 am after having spent all night trying to deal with launch issues. Hopefully tonight things will be more manageable.
What I did instead between trips into the other office to play with Josie was continue my adventures on Teer Fradee. The only real complaint I have with this game so far is that the encounters are not at all organic. As you travel along a path you know with pretty regularity that you will encounter groups of mobs at fixed points in the journey. Additionally there are large swaths of the game with absolutely nothing going on at all which feels a little weird. As I understand it this is sorta a general problem with games by this studio, but it is also the only thing that really stops it from feeling like a Dragon Age or Witcher game. I purchased the previous game by Spiders, and I think once I finish this one I will give it a shot as well. It is as a whole a little rough around the edges but the game itself is generally rather good.
This is Tripod, named such for the fact that she is a three legged cat that comes to visit from time to time. Tripod does not realize we love her yet, and bolts at the sight of us… but we do our best to try and make sure she has food. She is one of a handful of neighborhood cats that occasionally visit our house and we were scared to death that she was no longer with us. We’ve had a cold snap and for a couple of weeks we had not managed to catch any sight of her on the front porch cam where we put out food every day. However several times this week we have seen her lurking around the backyard which was pretty much the highlight of the week. We are hoping she is still around during the spring and summer months and maybe just maybe we can teach her that we are friendly people while we are out and about in the back and front yard more often.
This Friday post is somewhat turning into a “things left on the cutting room floor” post about the week. The other day I talked about restarting Witcher 2 so that I could go down the path that was not taken, and I have now reached the first branch in the road… and more or less determined that I made the correct choice the first time. While I greatly enjoyed the “non-human” path, I gotta say I am not loving the blatant racism and bigotry of the “human” path right now. Additionally it is super weird to have as my companions, characters that I more or less learned to greatly dislike during the other play through. As a result my completion of this play through is pretty much in jeopardy. In many games the various path options are equally good and it is just a matter of taste, but for me at least there seems like a clear correct choice here and I made the wrong one on attempt two.
The other issue from which I am suffering is that I am staying up way the hell too late reading and it is starting to cut into my sleep schedule. It feels thoroughly odd to be saying this because I have not been a person to stay up late reading that often in my life. This is complicated by the fact that I read relatively slowly and that at least until my wife falls asleep she is pretty regularly making random comments while I attempt to follow the text. At this point I am roughly halfway through the second book in the Witcher series and I am looking forward to getting into the novels proper having focused on the two prequel short story collections first. The books have not really done much yet to improve my opinion of Yennefer, which is weird because I thought all of the loyalty fans have must have come from reading the books.
Another weird revelation is that there were a lot of moments in Witcher 3 that I mistook as me not knowing what was going on because I had not played the other games. Now I know I am completely incorrect in that assessment and instead the game is just deep diving into character relationships from the books without giving the player much of a heads up about it. Last night I read for example the story of Dudu Biberveldt, a character that I just assumed had showed up in the games before. However having played the second game and watched several synopsis videos of the first game… I am pretty certain that is not a thing and he just lives in the novels. I have to admit though it is this sort of thing that makes the setting so infectious for me, because the things that are constantly left unanswered make me want to go then dig for the answers. I have a feeling that it might have the opposite effect on some of my friends however.
Yesterday was a big reveal of the next expansion for Elder Scrolls Online, and we are going back to Skyrim. The expansion seems like it is going to center on the Solitude area and more importantly Blackreach, one of the coolest areas in Elder Scrolls V. I am all about Dwemer ruins, and supposedly Blackreach is going to make up roughly half of the playable content area in this expansion. They are once again doing a year long story that unfolds over the course of several updates, and considering that I didn’t play any of the “Year of the Dragon” content, I am wondering if this is time for me to update the client and go back into the game. I have most of Morrowind and all of the newer content to experience.
I realize this in some ways goes directly in the face of my whole desire to stop chasing the forever game, but for Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Star Wars the Old Republic I play them more or less in a single player manner. I come back to the game after a large bundle of content has built up and then can happily binge the new story in an almost Netflix manner before leaving once again and going off and playing other things. I wish I could play World of Warcraft in the same sort of manner, but the way their patch content is released makes it a struggle to try and figure out what the hell is going on at any time if you were not around to see it doled out in small chunks. I am realizing that I find I greatly prefer content that is gated behind completing the previous content just for sake of making it easier to follow.
