Queuewalker

Good morning friends! I thought this morning I would take a bit on the blog to talk about me and Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much not done with the game, but the current congestion situation that we find ourselves in has made it much harder for me to play “on a whim”. I’ve been doing my normal end of the year/beginning of the year binge of single player games. However normally when I am in this mode I am still logging in at least once a day into the MMORPGs I am playing at the same time. Generally speaking at least once per day I would log in, maybe do a roulette or deal with my retainers and then log back out. The challenge however is that I plan on the highest population data center and one of the highest population servers period.

When I was working on the Main Story Quest for Endwalker, I had a pretty rigorous routine of logging in at a specific time during the day so that I could be through the queue when I got “off work”. The queue would idle in the background and tick down as I finished out my afternoon and then could be ready to make progress in the story. The drive to do this was there because the story of Endwalker was so damned good. What has happened since then however is that I fell out of the routines I had been engaged with because I was in “vacation mode”. This means that by the time I think about logging in, it is usually early evening and the queues are already madness.

Earlier this week I tried to make my way through. I logged in as soon as I got off work, and then proceeded to go about my daily routine of fixing dinner and feeding the animals. About an hour and a half later we were sitting at the lower number. Meaning in that hour and a half I made it roughly one third of the way through the initial queue. My quick napkin math told me I had at least 2-3 more hours before I could make my way in… at which point I bailed out and gave my slot to someone else who needed it more. Finishing the MSQ took away a lot of my drive to fight through that queue because I know at some point in the future I can catch back up pretty easily. Instead I have been spending that time focused on playing games that are also bringing me joy… but can more easily be played on my schedule.

Once I burn through this current phase of single player games, if the state of the queues is still this rough I might even poke my head back into Elder Scrolls Online. I am still woefully behind the main story and sitting somewhere in Summerset at the moment. Which means I still have a mount of content in front of me before I am even vaguely ready for the new expansion that they are already teasing. So to recap…. very much not done with Endwalker and Final Fantasy XIV but the queues are making it very difficult to muster the desire to fight my way through them at the moment.

Mods and Witcher 3

I am spending an excessive amount of time roaming around the world of Witcher 3. Last night I finally wrapped up most of the loose ends in the Velen/Novigrad areas and made my way over to the Isle of Skellige. I specifically love this sequence of the game, so often times I try and wrap everything up so that when I get there I can feel like I can really explore it freely. Writing blog posts when I am actively playing a story driven game… that features a large number of spoilers for anyone who has NOT played it… always lands in this really weird place for me. I don’t want to accidentally ruin an experience for someone that might follow in my footsteps and become interested in the game. However at the same time there is only so much time that I can spend talking about things in only the most general of terms.

Instead this morning I thought I would talk about some of the care and feeding of this current Witcher 3 play through. If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know that I greatly favor the PC as a platform, and one of the main reasons behind this apart from my love of keyboard and mouse controls is the fact that I can easily modify the game to behave the way I want it to. If there is something that annoys me with a console game, I basically have to make a decision if I am going to suck it up and deal with it… or just quit playing the game. On the PC however we have another option… to fix whatever behavior I personally find offending and then move on with the modified and more enjoyable experience. Along with most of the internet… I use NexusMods as my core source for all my modding needs and maintain a subscription to it just to speed up data transfers.

I am going to take a little bit and talk about the mods that I am running on this particular play through of the game.

Over 9000 – Weight Limit Mod

One of the things that I hate almost more than anything in a big open world like this is being limited in my ability to loot and scoot. I hate inventory management. It is legitimately the bane of my existence in games, and when I can either install a mod or run a console command and never have to worry with it ever again… I am always going to take that option. Thankfully the mod scene has made this extremely painless and given me a mod that takes my item weight limit from around 100 to 9999. This allows me to run around for days without caring about managing items while still looting until my heart is content.

Autoloot – Autoloot the Items You Want

Going hand in hand with this is a mod that just automagically loots everything when you kill anything or interact with a container. It converts the notifications to a little toast window in the lower lefthand corner of the screen giving you a quick notification of everything that was just sucked into your inventory. The specific variant that I am running is the file set that will keep you from accidentally stealing anything. I am contemplating swapping over to the Herbs and Corpses variant however which apparently auto picks up any herbs that you run past that are in your loot radius. If a corpse has an item on it needed for quest progress, you still have to manually loot it.

Fast Travel from Anywhere

The map in Witcher 3 is massive, and this one is largely a quality of life change to make navigating around a bit easier. By default you have to make your way back to a signpost marked in green on your map, which will then allow you to teleport to any other signpost you have already unlocked. This mod is pretty straight forward and cuts out the travel time allowing you to just crack open the map and teleport directly. This is phenomenal for when you have fought your way down into an area and are nowhere near civilization and just want to pop back to town to do something quickly. Essentially it makes Witcher work more like other games with fast travel points.

Lamp on Player’s Boat

The older I get the harder time I have with nighttime and picking out details… and this carries forward with video games as well. In general if I am running around at night in Witcher 3, I have my torch out but there are a number of actions that keep you from using your torch. One of these for example is piloting a boat and this mod simply adds a torch to every boat in the game giving you some illumination. It also makes it way easier to spot the boats in the world scattered along the coastline. Like most of the mods I am using it is the little quality of life things that I tend to tweak.

Cheap Dyes Everywhere and Dye-able Starting Armor

One of the cool features that was added into the game with the Blood and Wine expansion, is the ability to dye certain armor sets. This is a feature that I did not even know existed until I went searching for a mod to change the look of my favorite armor set. I love the Ursine Witcher armor, but I am not a big fan of the cream/green/red look that it comes with by default. What I wanted was the ability to dye my armor black like a proper Witcher armor should be. Now you cannot even start the Blood and Wine expansion before level 35, and the dyes don’t show up on vendors until then… but this mod changes that and makes a large number of vendors around the early parts of the game sell armor dyes and for cheap. Now I have my Ursine armor in darker shades and am significantly happier with life.

That is it folks. Those are all of the mods that I happen to be running at this moment. There is one that I have been eyeing that changes the scabbards for the swords to black but I have not messed with installing it because often times you have to deal with mod conflicts. For example there is an addon that I would love to use that marks every quest that you have in your journal on your map, so that you can know if there are other quests in the near vicinity that you can complete at the same time. However it conflicts with the Fast Travel mod, and I have not wanted to mess with figuring out how to manually merge the two. For me a lot of the mods that I end up using remove friction that I do not personally find meaningful. Modding is ultimately just that a very personal choice, and while I would not say anything that I am doing is “required” to enjoy the game it absolutely improves my enjoyment.

Good Chorfun

Good Morning Friends! I am slowly trying to get back into the swing of things. My last day of work for the year was 12/17 and as a result I am good and toast when it comes to actually getting up at normal times. Normal for me being 5:30 in the morning, but I am struggling forward regardless and trying to make a blog post happen. Apologies for the extremely sporadic nature of my posts over the last few weeks but I was very much “in vacation mode”. The truth is you didn’t miss an awful lot and I have fallen back into a single player gaming binge. For the last few weeks I have been getting up around 8 am when the synergy of my bladder and the cats wanting food coalesced into forcing me out of the bed. Now we are returning to being governed by an alarm and so far… the progress is mixed.

Thanks to watching my way through the second season of Witcher over the break, I have found myself returning to playing Witcher 3. This will be my second full play through of the game and it is just as good as I remember it being. There is something about the end of one year and the beginning of a new one… that seemingly drives me to wanting to play a big meaty open world single player adventure. The weirdest part about this most recent turtle is that it isn’t really due to me being stressed and needing a break from humanity. If anything I have the latent desire to be around other people, but my brain just wants to be playing these sort of games instead of diving back into the Endwalker alt leveling and gear grinding process.

It started initially as a good intentioned “lets have a break to let other people play this extremely congested game”, and has more or less turned into an obsession with completing all of the things in Velen and Novigrad. I love this world and setting and I love being my kind-hearted version of Geralt. Someone really in need and shouldn’t be spending coin in my services? Well if given the chance I will take the “you keep the coin” option. I will say that the game actively fights against you trying to turn Geralt into a questing knight however, because often times things don’t go down as you might hope. I’ve found a number of quests this time around that I somehow missed last time and me trying my best to save the say… has not necessarily been good enough. Then there are the comedy relief quests like the Trolls… and I love Witcher Trolls. It was also only on this playing… that I finally grasped what “Chorfun” meant.

The thing that I have been struggling with is that initially I had decided to give Yennifer a try this time around. However… I just can’t do it. Triss is just better in every possible way and I kinda hate that Yennifer is so hardly pushed as the “lore correct” answer. Yen is just not a good match for my kinder gentler soft-hearted version of Geralt. Yen makes sense if you are leaning into the whole “two hopelessly fucked up people who deserve each other” aspect of The Witcher universe, but just feels wrong to me personally. That said if you are a Yen stan I won’t get in your way… but I have a feeling I am going to keep choosing Miss Merigold over and over each time I play through.

All of this said… I have picked back up the novels and started up again where I left off with Blood of Elves. This time last year I read through the first two books… which are largely a collection of short stories. By the time I got to Blood of the Elves, it was just dense enough to make me bounce after reading the two much more casual reads in a row. For the last several nights I have been reading for about an hour on my phone and while I read terribly slowly… especially when my wife keeps trying to talk to me while reading… however I am about halfway through at this point. My wife and I have completely different “going to sleep routines”. For her it is like she needs to get all of her talking out of her system before she can sleep… but for me I need silence to wind down and the more she talks… the more I wake back up. Generally speaking through reading something is one of the better ways for me to drift off to slumber and reading the book on my phone gives me these perfectly bite sized chunks of the book formatted to fit the small screen.

Well this is a blog post down… and I am still awake so here is hoping I can get back into the swing of actually waking up on time and knocking out a post each morning. I had a great break and I hope you all did as well.

Midgar Reimagined

I am uncertain what it is about Christmas Vacation that makes me extra antisocial. Maybe it is the crowds and dealing with Christmas shopping, but whatever the case I tend to go through a turtle phase at the end of the year and beginning of the next. This is specifically heralded by me significantly increasing the number of single player types of games that I am engaged with. Last year at this time it was Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi Fallen Order then a foray into Knights of the Old Republic 2 in January. The year before that I was heavily engaged Witcher 2 and 3 and this pattern keeps going back as you look at what I am playing at the end/beginning of the year. Winter break seems to have been the time I actually re-engaged with Final Fantasy VII Remake and finally finished it.

I have to say I really liked what they did with this. Not only did they spend a lot of time fleshing out areas of the game that buzzed by extremely quickly in the original game, but also taking the opportunity to change the story a bit. This is going into mild spoiler territory but if you have not caught on… Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a faithful recreation of the original and more a re-imagining of the game and with that comes an interesting plot device to explain those differences. I think it works well and I greatly appreciate the more action oriented style of gameplay… which again is a non-starter for some fans of the original. I greatly enjoyed the ride and look forward to the next “disc” worth of game when it releases.

I’ve moved on to Intergrade, which is the Yuffie adventure. So far this is extremely enjoyable and it has a completely different feel to the base “Remake”. While it weaves in an out of the story, it has an almost Cowboy Bebop vibe to it… which I think is largely influenced by the deep jazz cuts for the soundtrack. I am not very far into this side adventure but I think it will be an enjoyable way to finish out this week… if it lasts that long. After watching Witcher on netflix… I am having a deep desire to replay Witcher 3 which may end up happening. I also really want to try Red Dead Redemption 2 again to see if it can grab me this time around. I bounced pretty hard the first time but I have a good friend who absolutely loved it… so I might give it another shot. I don’t love the Rockstar style of open world games, but now that I better understand what the expectations are… maybe I can account for that in my expectations.

Lastly I am still poking my head into New World each day for long enough to collect 3 packages, make a gypsum orb, and make a sword cast to get expertise gains. I have to say the merger has had the opposite impact for me… in actually killing my desire to play the game. Firstly there is the challenge that there are exactly 3 covenant territories… and all three of them are the places where I have a home. Second there is the problem that on Minda Brightwood was one of the best late game crafting hubs… and on Frislandia it has been maintained by a bunch of slumlords who have done little to nothing to keep the crafting machines maintained. All of my crafting resources were centered around my tier 4 house in Brightwood… which sorta wrecks any desire to actually try and craft anything since there isn’t the resources I actually need there.

So I am concerned that as people continue to leave the game… we might end up going through another round of mergers meaning that once again the structure of the towns and the machines in them could change. This really harms my enjoyment when I do not care at all about the PVP mini-game. My personal preference would be that crafting resources never downgrade, and once a town is tier 5 in everything… that it just stays that way because this nonsense of mergers downgrading towns has been a significant hardship. I am sure that once the Christmas event is over and I no longer get free upgrades and gold every day… that New World is going to fall by the wayside for me.