Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Midgar Reimagined

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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.

Adepta Sororitas

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Yesterday was a good day, although it wasn’t a terribly productive one. Some months back one of my good friends… legitimately probably the only friend that I am still in contact with from my High School years… moved into an apartment in the same suburb of Tulsa where I live. I legitimately don’t see a lot of people right now because still fairly leery from Covid numbers in our area. However yesterday I got out of my comfort zone a bit and we got together for about an hour yesterday afternoon. I had a little something for him and he a little something for me… though his little something is pretty phenomenal. Both of our gifts were a little self serving in that I picked him up a Magic the Gathering Commander deck because I would really like to play some in person Commander soon.

He on the other hand went to way more effort and assembled and painted me this start to a Sisters of Battle Army. Again because he would really like to get some war-gaming in soon when things calm down a bit. The only problem that we foresee is that neither of us have a large table, or really the ROOM for a large table to set up and play on. I did wonder about maybe booking a backroom in the local library every so often for a games day. I miss playing games physically and would love to get engaged in more of that… now that legitimately he lives less than two miles away from my house. The photo does not at all do justice to the models as the lighting I snapped a picture under is not exactly optimal for miniatures.

In other gaming news I have passed the Wall Market section of Final Fantasy VII Remake and honestly am not super far off from the point where I left on in my PS5 run of the game. PC gaming is just more conducive to my lifestyle right now and it is super easy for me to drop into a game. I guess I could be playing remotely through my laptop via the third party app that I have been using. That is probably how I am going to play Horizon Forbidden West but there is just something preferable about controlling these games with a mouse and keyboard for me. The only section that has been particularly awful is the motorbike combat section… where I had to contort my hands in such a way as to hit the throttle button while also steering and swinging a sword. It is nothing that changing the keybinds would not fix but I didn’t take that amount of time to figure out a new scheme.

I am poking my head into New World about once a day to loot three packages and create a sword mold for a daily expertise boost. All of the other activities are sort of a bit “much” for me right now. I am very much only tangentially engaged in the game. The servers have merged and as a result I now play on Frislandia instead of Minda given that all of Arkadia Theta merged into a single server. Everything is definitely more lively and I am sure that I could probably go back to farming outdoor content for expertise levels if I wanted to. However I just have not found the drive to return to group activity. Most of the people that I had been playing with from the larger Minda community jumped ship to other servers and the thought of trying to make inroads from scratch again… does not seem terribly compelling.

I am interested to watch the map over the next few days. When the servers merged we inherited Frislandia’s map which was largely dominated by Syndicate. The only non-syndicate territory was unfortunately Brightwood… where I have my Tier 4 house. Over night it seems that a Marauder guild managed to capture Cutlass Keys, and there are a handful of other wars brewing. According to the folks on Frislandia, the server has always been dominated by Syndicate so I guess we will see how well the upcoming wars shake out in favor of that status quo. It seems like at least one of the servers that merged in was Covenant dominant because almost all of the Wars that are queued up are team Yellow trying to seize territory.

FFVII Remake PC Thoughts

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On December 16th, Final Fantasy VII Remake came out on the PC, and once again I have been a sucker and repurchased the game. I had some credit and a coupon on the Epic Games Store which knocked down the price tag but be warned this game on this platform is fully embracing Square’s new $70 default price for games. There are lots of comments about this trend, but I don’t so much mind it. The price has been stuck at $60 for a new game for a very long time and has not taken into account a whole slew of issues that have increased the cost of game development. We have been insulated from the actual cost of development for a very long time and I fully expect the price to keep moving up there.

I think we also have this habit of misremembering the price of games from the past. This is a Toys R Us ad from Christmas 1996 and you can see there are three games that are already going for $70 in 1996 money. Adjusted for inflation that $70 item in 96 would be $124 today. I remember that when Final Fantasy 3 (known now as 6) came out it was around $80 and Phantasy Star 4 was roughly $90 making those roughly $140 and $160 in today’s money. I am just uncertain if a $70 new release is a hill worth dying on right now. However based on the various YouTube channels that I watch… it seems to be a bridge too far for some folks. For me I had coupons and some credit which took the price down to something worth it to me in order to play the game with a mouse and keyboard.

The game runs exceptionally well… but it damned well better on a RTX 3080. The only awkwardness is just how generally awful the menu system is in the game. WASD mimics a dpad, and you have to use it to navigate through the menu options… which should instead just be accessible with your mouse. It reminds me a lot of some of the early Xbox 360 ports like Force Unleashed which had a similar “keyboard as controller” sort of control scheme. I have gotten used to it pretty quickly with your mouse wheel being able to zip up and down menu structures but it might be too much for some folks to engage with. There are some really weird choices like the Spacebar for example opens up your combat menu and M brings up the menu options… whereas N is your map. I am hoping it gets either an official update or an unofficial patch that makes all of this work more smoothly. However it is no worse than other Square ports that I have played.. which often screw up the interfaces.

Combat however feels fluid and I can forgive a lot of fiddling with UI elements if the moment to moment gameplay is enjoyable. Mouse look is flawless and you can attack by left clicking in an action role-playing style. That said… for the people who did not play in Action combat mode… I can maybe see being frustrated with the game. All of the things that I generally considered “fine” would rapidly become infuriating if I were actually fiddling with the menus a lot. For me since I embrace the action mode rework of FF7, the end result feels pretty fluid. The only negative are the few segments where your camera is fixed Resident Evil style and you have to navigate with just WASD. Those felt kinda awful on the console as well, so I think that is just poor design on the part of the game and not something specific to the PC port.

Essentially if you don’t have a PlayStation 4 or 5… then this is potentially your only real option for playing through the Final Fantasy VII Remake content. If it had release on PC day one, then I absolutely would have chosen this platform from the start. If you prefer gaming with a mouse and keyboard… then again this might be the better option for you. You can always hook up a controller and everything seems to work just like it did on PlayStation. There is a lot of fiddling with the UI which is not great, but for me it is fine and I am enjoying myself playing through the early bits of VII Remake again. If the price tag is a barrier for you, then I figure in six months time that will be resolved as well.

Winter Convergence

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Tis the season for holiday events to show up in the games we play and New World was not to be outdone. Yesterday the large December 1.2 update landed and with it a new Winter Convergence event. With it came a whole slew of changes that I will talk about at least in part, but the most noticeable one is that every settlement now has a tree in the middle of it. Once a day you can loot these trees for presents… of which you are able to get 3 good ones per day. The “good” presents have so far given me 1 Diamond Gypsum per, a few Silver Bars, and 100 coins. The subsequent packages after the first three just reward winter tokens which are the currency used in game by the event to purchase items at the winter village.

Scattered around the map are the Winter Villages, which are helmed by an NPC Yeti called the Winter Wanderer. They will send you on a series of quests related to the event which involves picking up packages that spawn around the world near roads, and taking out their evil Yeti brethren in various Ice caves. There is a reputation with the event that works much like the three factions, and with it unlocks different tiers of gear that you can purchase with the Winter Tokens. The armor and weapons are equivalent to the items you can get from the faction vendors with the weapons all offering a luck bonus. For the PVE focused players… now that they made farming the PVP missions for tokens a pain in the ass… this might be your chance to get a set of 520 gear and some 525 weapons.

The biggest change with the patch however is that they have converted the ambiguous “High Watermark System” into something tangible and track-able called Expertise. For those of us who ground up our watermark a bit… this has finally allowed us to actually see where various item watermarks were sitting. Out beside each item is now a purple number which represents what the watermark for that given gear slot is. For me all of my watermarks look a little something like this:

  • Helmet – 576
  • Chest – 577
  • Hands – 576
  • Legs – 576
  • Boots – 574
  • Shield – 562
  • Necklace – 518
  • Ring – 500
  • Earring – 500
  • Sword – 535
  • Great Axe – 545
  • Hammer – 556
  • Hatchet – 544
  • Spear – 539
  • Rapier – 545
  • Bow – 550
  • Musket – 529
  • Life Staff – 554
  • Fire Staff – 562
  • Ice Gauntlet – 556
  • Void Gauntlet – 512

Supposedly more Necks, Rings, and Earrings have been added to the world to make these a little easier to watermark. It was much to my chagrin that I noticed my highest watermark weapon… is also one that I will never use the Fire Staff, while the one I use the most is sitting only at 535. Once again I say that this system is awful… but at least it is more clear how bad we are getting screwed.

They also put in kilns spread throughout the world, which are unfortunately NOT in the main territories. Instead you are going to have to trek out to the unheld north in order to find one of these. Thankfully I still had my inn bound to Mountainhome from the days when farming Myrkgard was actually viable. Various activities drop various kinds of Gypsum and you can craft this into a Gypsum Orb once per day. You can then trade a Gypsum Orb at the Kiln for a Gypsum Cast of a specific item type which acts as a lootbox giving you a guaranteed expertise/watermark upgrade. For example I made a Sword Cast which took me from 533 to 535 so this is not going to be a fast process by any means. Here are some of the sources for Gypsum.

  • Obsidian – Dropped by level 60+ Elite Mobs in the World and requires three
  • Sapphire – Dropped from last boss of Lazarus Instrumentality or Garden of Genesis and only requires one
  • Ruby – Dropped from Outpost Rush Caches and requires two
  • Emerald – Dropped from Trade Skill Aptitude Caches and requires one
  • Citrine – Dropped from Arena Caches (Siren Queen etc) and requires one
  • Amethyst – Dropped from Max Level Corruption Breach/Portal Caches and requires seven also not 100% drop
  • Diamond – Dropped from events, currently the first 3 tree presents you loot each day and requires three
  • Topaz – Dropped from level 55+ mobs in the world after consuming an attunement potion and requires ten

The Topaz is a bit weird because once a day you can craft an attunement potion, which allows for Topaz Gypsum to drop from any level 55 or higher open world mob. The gotcha there is that the potion can only be crafted once per day and requires one of every elemental “animal” aka Fire Snail, Water Fish, etc. I had a stockpile of these but if you were to try and farm them… it would take awhile not only to find all of them but to get the purple animal drop instead of motes.

All told it isn’t a bad update but it also doesn’t really reduce the overall grindy nature of the game. I still question the design decisions they have made to reach this point. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that all of the open world areas for watermarking have been nerfed into the ground. Anything that used to allow for solo watermarking is just not viable anymore. They are pushing players hard to get into dungeons and arenas, which require the crafting of keys. Keys which I am almost certain will eventually be sold on the cash shop to “speed up” the process. I’ve also noticed that every single item now has a greyed out “Upgrade” button claiming it requires something called “Umbral Shards” to upgrade the item. I have a feeling that these also will eventually show up on the cash shop.

The last bit of news that came out yesterday is an official confirmation of which servers would be merging. I had theorized at one point that they might just collapse entire server blocks because if you collapsed the entirety of Arkadia Theta where Minda is… you would still not quite end up with 2000 players based on the trends. They appear to be doing exactly this which means that all of the servers would be merging into Adlivun the most populated server in our block. That means all of our territory will default to whatever was held on Adlivun.

On the Syndicate side, currently the only company holding any territory is Fenris which has two different guilds “holdings” and “acquisitions”. Similarly the majority of Marauder territory is held by Minas Morgul which has three different companies holding territory. In theory all of these companies will be seeing a pretty big payday as a result of the merger and then losing their territory. I would expect that all of these mergers are probably going to take place next week, so if you are on a lower pop server I guess now is the time to farm materials while the getting is good. The real question however is if any of this is going to turn the tide of this game. To that I think the answer is a resounding no. Players have moved on and are unlikely to return unless something drastic happens. We’ve recently dropped below the 100,000 player peak concurrency threshold and I doubt that is going to change significantly.