Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Bungie 30th Anniversary

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Hey Friends, I have been struggling to attach to games this week… and honestly last week as well. Having finished Endwalker, I have been purposefully staying away from that game in my small way of trying to help with congestion so that more people can get through it. I get that I am just one person… but if more people took a step away for a bit, more folks would get to experience that great expansion. In the meantime I have been floundering a bit to find new purpose and booted up Destiny 2 on a whim… and it more or less stuck. I think mostly my mental and emotional speed right now is “mindless shootymans game”. It doesn’t hurt that there is a 30th Anniversary event going on in game and with it a bunch of interesting drops.

The best of these for my purposes is the BXR-55 Battler which is essentially a pulse rifle patterned off of the Battle Rifle from Halo. The default load out has it burst firing, but I have slotted in a mod that shifts mine to full auto making it a pretty great primary weapon. What I really dig about this weapon is the accuracy and range and the ability to hip-fire it reliably. Which effectively gives me a single weapon that can be scoped for something akin to a scout rifle for picking off targets at range, or hip-fired to give me something that feels like an auto rifle. I have this sneaking feeling that this is going to eventually get nerfed because it seems to be dominating the meta a the moment.

There are a whole slew of other weapons that are in honor of past Bungie games. If you were more of a Covenant person, you can pick up the Retraced Path which is sort of themed after the Carbine. It also serves as the first legendary quality trace rifle, with the rest of weapons in that category taking up your exotic slot. If the Energy Sword was more your jam, the game has two “half” energy swords that make me wonder if we are eventually going to get an exotic quest to join them into the true Energy Sword equivalent. I never played Marathon because I did not have access to a Mac, but apparently the shotgun that drops is in honor of that game. There is a grenade launcher dropping and I have no clue what it is themed after other than it bears resemblance to the Mountain Top.

The new game mode that drops most of these weapons is called Dares of Eternity and is a weird “game show” hosted by the Starhorse and Xur. Essentially you spin a wheel and this chooses what type of enemy you face during that round. You battle your way through multiple rounds and then face a classic Destiny 1 boss at the very end. There is a scoring system which allows you to complete bounties for the Starhorse, and a more general series of bounties that you can complete for Xur. You win at least one key per round and can also get Strange Coins from doing other activities during the Anniversary Event that you can turn in for more keys or other items. If you unlock enough caches and save up enough keys you can earn things like ships or sparrows as well as I believe a full armor set.

All in all it is some “big dumb fun”, and I think that is what my brain needs right now. There is a new DLC dungeon that I would love to get a group for at some point so I can pick up Gjallarhorn which is tied to completing it. Additionally there is a quest chain that unlocks an exotic sidearm that is based off of the pistol from Halo that I would like to get as well. Mostly I am spending my time doing Dares of Eternity over and over, but I have started knocking out some weekly rewards to try and get my light level up there. It is still not the best system in the world, but after New World I know that it could be so much worse.

Sticking the Landing

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Well folks… once again I try my best to cherry pick a screenshot that doesn’t obviously show anything for a post as I am trying to maintain my stance of not spoiling anything. Yesterday I wrapped up the Endwalker Main Story Quest and let me tell you… it was a ride. With all certainty this is my favorite Final Fantasy XIV expansion and quite possibly my favorite MMORPG expansion of all time. Yesterday I talked a bit about the complicated emotions surrounding that notion, because this is a game that requires you to have lived through all of the hundreds of hours of content from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker to really appreciate the gravity of this situation. Friends… I cried so much last night, enough that my wife suggested that maybe I really shouldn’t be playing this game especially since my baby is still in the hospital right now and that has caused a massive dip in my emotions as well. They were not all bad tears…. and honestly a lot of them were the tears of remembrance and joy that you might have when visiting old friends.

Endwalker is an expansion that does not go anywhere I might have expected it to go. It was an expansion where we knew four of the six total destinations ahead of time, but even then… there were so many revelations as I played through it. The remaining two “secret” destinations really are mind boggling and I am still reeling from the impact of some of the revelations that come from them. If I had a complaint it would only be that the sixth location arrived too late and was a bit too cumbersome to traverse. It played a key role in the story… but after the first interludes it was pretty certain the path before us… and then it just took a long time for it to actually play out along those lines. Essentially the pacing of the final chapter of the game was a bit monotonous for my tastes. That does not mean that the conclusion does not feel earned or meaningful, but those final steps as we got there were a bit cumbersome.

That said I feel like they absolutely “stuck the landing”, and managed to drive home the actual final moments of the expansion. More important than the journey I just completed… I have so much hope for where we are going next. The game does a great job of teasing just how little of the world we actually know anything about and how many of the reflections we have yet to visit. I am extremely interested to see the next story and how it evolves over the course of this expansion and its patches. The only thing that I don’t fully know is the shape of the post patch content, because it honestly feels like we have tied up most of the loose ends associated with the “Ascian” storyline. In the past there has always been a dangling thread here or there that could be tugged upon, and we are really lacking that. I do wonder if they will spend the .1 through .55 patch really devoting it entirely to setting up the next conflict, instead of breaking that into an epilogue and prologue like they have done before.

Now we tread into some light spoiler territory, but Endwalker is an expansion that has made me care about every single character save one. I do not get Zenos existing past Stormblood in the Final Fantasy XIV franchise. I am uncertain if this character is just super beloved in Japan or something, but it is without a doubt the worst creation to come out of the Final Fantasy franchise. Even Kefka has more depth and he is just a murderous clown. Zenos being too painfully bored to care about anything is not interesting, and I feel like the fact that he had anything to do with Endwalker and Shadowbringers for that matter is a waste of screen time. My spoiler is this… they never manage to do anything interesting with Zenos and he is STILL the worst character. Even Fandaniel they manage to make me care about and add some depth to that character, but Zenos remains a one note tune that just has cool armor and weapons.

Now I find myself terribly torn. I want to start working on the endgame, and want to start leveling additional characters… but I also sorta feel bad in doing so because maybe I should back the fuck out for awhile and let someone else have my slot. I did what I felt like I needed to do… I completed the storyline and now have experienced that emotional roller coaster. Now I want to make sure all of my friends have experienced it so that we can have the big spoiler show about it. The problem is… it isn’t like I can actually give my spot in the line to someone else. So I am in this weird territory where it almost feels like it is my duty to stop playing for awhile until everyone has caught up… but also I don’t want to. We will see how the weekend goes and I guess I am thankful that Kenzie being hospitalized has at least allowed me to stop trying to nursemaid her constantly so that I could finish things up.

Endwalker and its story has really been a godsend the last few days, and has kept my mind off the constant worry over my baby girl. There isn’t much that I can do right now and I have to have faith that the doctors are doing what they can while she is hospitalized. They are under Covid protocols still and it isn’t like I can even go see her right now. I am getting calls from the Vet a few times a day with status updates and things are still pretty touch and go. She is improving and starting to act more like herself but she is very much not out of the woods yet. Essentially they are fighting to stabilize her blood sugar while at the same time trying to control negative reactions happening in her pancreas and liver while also fighting a bladder infection that they feel probably triggered the entire cascade reaction. I talked to the Vet three times yesterday and the first one was pretty grim, but as he progressed through the day he got more hopeful in his voice. Essentially his focus is to get her well enough to come home, so that she can rest in her familiar environment and heal faster as such. In theory that should happen at some point this weekend. So I greatly appreciate all the thoughts and prayers I have gotten for Kenzie butt, and here is hoping everything continues to go in the right direction.

The Best Expansion

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Ambiguous screenshot time! Really I feel like there is almost nothing that I can actually talk about from Endwalker itself without somehow being at risk of spoiling something. This is definitely the sort of experience that you don’t want to spoil for anyone. I am now sitting at level 90 and have what feels like quite a lot of story left to go. There is one entire end game zone that I have yet to discover, and I am guessing that this sort of flow was planned as I am already wearing my set of artifact gear that I obtained at level 89. Instead of talking about the story itself I am going to talk this morning about a general thought process running through my head.

I am very drawn to calling Endwalker as the best Final Fantasy XIV expansion to date, but I find myself questioning if that is even a fair designation. It feels like if you had skipped the story all the way through A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers… would this one expansion be capable of standing on its own? I think it would still be a very interesting story being told, but so much of what is happening stands upon the shoulders of a decades worth of experiences. There are moments that draw back to Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 and major touchstone moments that draw upon our experiences from every subsequent version of the game. As a result the Endwalker story cannot realistically be divorced from the decades worth of content that brought us to this point.

I had very similar thoughts when the Marvel Studios movie arc resolved itself with Avengers Endgame. If you were to ask me the single movie in that series that I enjoyed the most… then I would say Endgame without a doubt. However it is also a movie that cannot possibly stand on its own merit because by the time we reached that conclusion a decades worth of prolific movies had taken place. Twenty two movies lead us to the conclusion of Avengers Endgame and so many moments within that movie only really make sense if you were there for the entire ride. Is the story itself interesting? Sure especially if you have watched its bookend Infinity War, but will it have near the impact if you were not in it from the beginning? Hell no, there is no way you could feel the summoned feelings if you did not at least experience the majority of the films.

So ultimately if you ask me my favorite Final Fantasy XIV expansion, I am going to say Endwalker. It is the pay off that comes at the end of a very long and winding journey. If you are NOT caught up with Final Fantasy XIV then I implore you not to rush the process. The payoff that comes in Endwalker is worth the wait and you need to have experienced the roller coaster of emotions that led us to this point in order to really appreciate the totality of this journey. Those of us who have been on this journey are finally getting so many things explained… that would have probably felt cheap if we had just jumped to the end of the novel and read the last page. This resolution is well earned and I cannot count the number of times I have found myself weeping tears of joy and pain over this game. By the time we reach this point it feels that we are adventuring with old friends, and not random characters in a role-playing game.

I look forward to reaching the actual conclusion of the game and seeing how all of the loose ends get tied up into a bow. I am also extremely curious what the .1 through .3 patch cycle is going to look like this time around. Lastly I am extremely interested to see what new story arc is spawned out of this expansion. It really is the close of everything that came before it and the beginning of an entirely new era of Final Fantasy XIV.

Silence in Lieu of Spoilers

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Friends… it is becoming progressively harder to cherry-pick screenshots that are vague enough as not to be filled with spoilers. Truthfully it is also becoming progressively harder to talk about Endwalker without massive spoilers as well. This expansion keeps changing on me when I am not looking, and the places it is going… are shocking to me at least. So this morning you get this gem of a screenshot which taken completely out of context doesn’t really spoil anything at all. Last night I unlocked the level 87 dungeon and dinged level 89… which means I will hit 90 well before I have come close to finishing the Main Story Quest.

This means I am going to taper off doing any of the side quests, even though they were bringing me an awful lot of joy… just because it will feel real bad to be sitting at the level cap but not able to do any of the level cap things. I vaguely remember going through a similar situation where I hit the Tomra area of Shadowbringers and feeling like I needed to push forward the MSQ because I was just about to ding 80. It has been a pretty phenomenal expansion other than the whole “scared to death to actually log out” aspect of it. I was kinda hoping that as we got into the actual launch week that things would have calmed down a bit… but that doesn’t appear to be the case. In fact today is the day that anyone who did not get early access for some reason… is going to be starting the game.

Like I was uncertain that Square could create a better expansion than Shadowbringers, and pending they stick the landing… they have absolutely accomplished that feat with Endwalker. As I said I am just about to do the level 87 dungeon, which means I still have a lot more main story quest to go before I see the end of this… and an entire area I have yet to discover. So we could be going anywhere now because we have already gone places that I was not at all prepared for. That is about all I feel like I can say… but lord am I looking forward to our AggroChat full spoilers show at some point in the near future. Which reminds me I really need to work on getting the few FFXIV spoiler shows that pre-date me putting things on YouTube up on the site so I can create a proper playlist. If you are curious in our spoiler shows you can find most of them linked in this post. I think our first show was for the ARR post expansion content, and then have done one each expansion going forward.

With that I am going to bring to a close this morning’s post because I feel like there is a whole lot that I just can’t even talk about because spoilers. There may just be an unexpected gap in content for awhile because I am not sure how I am going to keep up these daily posts if avidly avoiding spoilers.