Good Morning Friends. This has been a bit of a weird week and I am not feeling super awesome. I am uncertain if I actually talked about it on the blog but I did something very stupid last week and ended up with several second degree burns. Thankfully however at this point they have all healed minus one spot on my forefinger. As far as gaming goes I have been alternating between wrapping up my play-through of Witcher 3 on the PC and playing the Xbox Series X. I am getting close to the end of the main campaign and am hoping I am on the right track for a very specific ending. In theory tonight or Saturday I should finish this up.
Apart from that I am spending quite a bit of time dinking around with Forza Horizon 5. I am not sure why the game is bringing me so much joy, especially since I seem to spend most of my time just driving around aimlessly. I’m installing it on my PC just to test a theory… but I am guessing I share everything between my XSX play sessions and PC play sessions. I have a handful of vehicles that I really enjoy, and managed to pull an orange rarity vehicle that allows me to fully customize the paint job. So I have this slick car with a two tone paint job that is purple fading to navy. Unfortunately I have been caught up in the moment and been forgetting to press the share button so you get this screenshot again.
This weekend Dad of War arrives on the PC, and I am probably going to be spending quite a bit of time playing that. I have it on the PlayStation but I remember playing it initially and thinking… that I really wish I could play it with a keyboard and mouse. We will see if it magically makes everything better for me, but regardless it is a game that I would love to play through fully. Forza has become my quick drop in and drop out game when I need a break from whatever epic saga I happen to be working on.
Apart from that I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning. I hope you are having a great week and end up having a phenomenal weekend.
Good Morning Friends! I’ve yet to really talk about it but I am now the proud owner of an Xbox Series X, that I acquired after much following of twitter alerts and after six months of this finally lucking into one. You might be asking yourself… but Bel, don’t you already have a PS5 and barely use it? Yes… that is in fact true but the heart wants what the heart wants and also Game Pass is a phenomenal offering and I miss out on a bunch of titles by not having an Xbox console. My old Xbox One 1980s VCR model just was not cutting it anymore and I needed to upgrade it to something more modern and viable. Additionally I am really wanting to play around with developer mode… but that is another story for another day. For those who may not have me on Xbox you can check out my profile here.
After setting up the Xbox this weekend, one of the first things that I started doing was downloading games that were available on Game Pass. One of the ones that I had really been wanting to try out is The Gunk. The tale centers around Rani and Becks a couple of what appears to be purposefully ambiguous terms… who happen to have a mortgage on a starship called the “Bunny” and refuse to each dinner without each other. You play as Rani who acts as the chief explorer and scavenger while Becks effectively is the pilot and maintains it and your robot buddy CuRT. You land on the planet in search of an energy signature which hopefully will lead to a source of fuel that you can scavenge and make some profit off of. What unfolds instead is a pure joyous exploration experience of uncovering a lost civilization and revitalizing this dead rock into a lush planet.
I’ve called this game a love child of Mario Sunshine, No Man’s Sky, and Ratchet and Clank. The first part of that comparison arrives as soon as you land and are confronted with this organic pollution that ends up getting referred to as “The Gunk”. This bubbling semi-sentient oil slick serves as an obstacle preventing you from moving forward. Thankfully you are equipped with your faithful prosthetic arm that happens to have a number of functional modes… one of which serves as a vacuum cleaner allowing you to suck up all of the bad stuff and clear the way. Once you have cleared an area of these pollutants it magically springs back to life and with it brings all sorts of flora and fauna.
All sorts of things happen once the gunk is gone, flowers grow and unfurl into bridges, vines spring forth giving you access to higher or lower areas, and plant life blooms giving you access to things like natural explosives and seeds that you can plant which will allow to to bridge gaps and reach new areas. This creates a really interesting gameplay loop of cleaning up the gunk, and then exploring everything that just opened up. In the above screenshot there is a plant growing that will ultimately flop over and serve as a bridge between two areas giving you access across the river.
While roaming the world you can gather a number of resources… which makes it feel a bit No Man’s Sky in that aspect as you collect metal, fiber, or organic matter with your multi-purpose prosthetic called “Pumpkin”. Scanning new life forms unlocks upgrades that you can then apply to your trusty tool. This is far less of a “talent tree” sort of situation and more of a series of unlocks that improve your efficiency of exploration and ultimately “combat”. The truth is I think over time you will have easily unlocked everything if you are spending any time trying to scan new planets or vacuum up new resources.
I threw combat in quotes because this isn’t a game with much ACTUAL combat. You do have a limited amount of “life” but for the most part any time you take a death you spawn back immediately where you left off. Combat instead serves more as a puzzle to solve with little gunk monsters that come from the larger free roaming gunk globs that you can suck up with pumpkin and then throw at other gunk monsters. Later there are also stationary turrets that you stun and run up on to pull them out of the ground before they wake back up. The game as a whole feels very “puzzle platformer” which is I guess where I get the Ratchet and Clank comparison, because movement and traversal matters and often times involves solving some minor puzzle to unlock a new pathway.
While exploring you can plant beacons in specific locations allowing you to fast travel back and forth between them and your base cap back at the “Bunny”. Generally speaking by the time I unlock a new beacon, I have gathered up enough resources or found enough new scans to unlock new ways to upgrade pumpkin. I can’t say that this is a terribly complicated game, but I do think it would be an ideal experience to play with kids. The game is not terribly demanding with the hardest interaction being to shoot a plant to knock off the part of it that explodes, and then pick it up and throw it to some destination. The game is exceptionally forgiving of death and if you fall from a jump, you start back where you leapt from without any need for backtracking.
Everything I have described is pretty basic, but what really sets this game apart is the interaction between its characters. Becks and Rani are very much committed to each other, and each time you are in danger you can hear the fear in Becks voice. One of the side effects of the Gunk is it keeps causing you two to lose radio communication, and each time you re-establish the link there is a palpable sense of relief. Storytelling through radio chatter is a pretty tried and true mechanic, but this game gets so much impact out of it. You come to love the pair and their robot CuRT… which at some point was programmed to say “You Got Served” but now apparently can ONLY say that…. regardless of the situation.
One of the complaints that I have heard about the game is that it is very short, somewhere in the four to six hour range. There are some that feel that this game was “designed for gamepass” and that it somehow devalues the experience. There are others that are seemingly scared of the very obvious queerness of these characters, and they can rightly fuck off with that noise. For me it is this amazingly heartfelt and charming adventure about two scavengers trying to find something that can make their lives a little less painful, and maybe afford a better meal that gruel. I am having a blast and am in the 5th chapter out of what are apparently 8 in total. I am very happy that I chose this as one of my first XSX gaming experiences.
Right now it is available through Game Pass as part of the subscription or you can buy it outright for $25. Unfortunately at this very moment it seems to be only available through the windows store. My hope is over time it will release on other platforms because this game really does need to get more love. It isn’t a game that will move any consoles, but it absolutely adds a lot of value to that Game Pass subscription. If you have access to it then I highly suggest you check it out. If you can stomach actually downloading something from the Windows Store, then you can check it out here as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
