This morning I am attempting to make a quick blog post, but after yesterday I didn’t want to skip today. My Mom is doing considerably better and seems to more or less be out of the woods. The plan to effectively “melt” the clot with super high strength anti-clotting agent seems to have worked and they believe it is largely gone. There was a marked difference between yesterday and today in both her coloration and her demeanor. You could tell she was feeling better because she was way more chatty and also complaining about little things… which weirdly is a good sign. She was largely knocked out and fairly ashen grey when I first got there Tuesday morning.
At this point they have removed whatever the equivalent of a PICC line that she had delivering the clot busting agent directly to the location of the clot. They also removed all of the stuff that was going into her neck in general so currently she just has the IV which will ultimately remain until she is released from the hospital… which in theory should happen at some point today. Thanks for all of the thoughts, wishes and prayers for the last couple of days, and I am also super thankful to the folks in the ambulance for making the determination of what was going on and getting her to a cardiac unit quickly. For being a tiny spec in rural america, my home town has a pretty phenomenal volunteer ambulance service.
I don’t have an awful lot on the gaming front, but when I got home last night I played a bit more Destiny 2 and also spent some time catching up on the last few days worth of news. One of the more interesting rumors coming out of the pre-E3 leaks is that supposedly Bungie will be announcing today during a ViDoc or something similar that they are going cross play. This is legitimately a major wish of mine come true if it actually happens. Additionally there is talk about a Switch port of the game, and while Ashgar disagrees that this can happen it will be interesting to see. For all we know a more powerful version of the Switch is going to be announced at some point soon and that Destiny might be a launch title or something like that. Regardless I am super interested in seeing how well the cross play works.
In related news I have been poking around Dauntless now that it is officially part of the Epic Games store. if you look at the above image close enough you will see that I have a little PC icon beside my name, the second player has a little Playstation icon beside theirs and the last two have Xbox icons. I noticed absolutely nothing different about that fight until I got to the final screen and saw that we were all on different platforms. So this gives me lots of hope about the whole Destiny 2 cross play thing. I hope this also means that in the near future ALL titles will do this going forward.
For now I need to run so making an extra short post. Thanks again for all the thoughts. Hopefully life can get back to normal.
My schedule is completely out of whack right now because of the stuff I am doing in regards to the flooding in town. We are doing this 24/7 management shifts thing, and previously I took one of those sessions on Friday from 6 am to 3pm, and hoped to keep taking that shift given that it is the closest to my normal sleep patterns. Unfortunately due to some shuffling I am now going to be captain 2pm to 11pm… which is manageable but I’ve not gotten to sleep that late since I was actively raiding. As a result this morning I slept in considerably later than normal as I am not going into the office until right before my shift. The further results of that is that you are getting a blog post later than normal, and that I may partake of a nap at some point between now and 1:30 pm when I leave the house.
I’ve truly been all over the place game wise over the last few weeks and I blame it at least in part of my fragmented schedule due to the weather. One of the things that I poked my head into again was Elder Scrolls Online, in part because the Elsweyr expansion released… and also I find that name complete hell to try and spell. ESO does this interesting thing each time it releases a new expansion, in that it replaces the new player experience with one that begins right at the newest expansion. I believe this started with the Morrowind expansion, continued with Summerset and is now doing it again with Elsweyr, which leads to the problem I am in currently.
I am probably in the minority, but I greatly prefer the original starting experience that shipped with Elder Scrolls Online… aka the three starter islands of Khenarthi’s Roost, Stros M’Kai and Bleakrock. So after piddling around with a Necromancer which so far is nowhere near as much of my jam as I would have thought it would be… I wound up grabbing a character that was still on Khenarthi’s Roost to play around with just because I wanted to experience that start all over again. The funny thing about this is… this is how a character I created as a joke is winding up to be my primary alt. Van Belsing was largely created at the insistence of a friend of mine, and was never intended to be played, but here we are with the fact that I’m now level 8 on that character and having a lot of fun re-experiencing the original starting game flow.
As far as my main goes… I am nowhere near Elsweyr either and still digging into the Vvardenfell campaign. I have a weird requirement when I am playing my main character in that I will only do content in the order in which it was released. Now I had to pace this out a bit given that both Thieves Guild and Assassin’s Guild are not exactly expansion that you can fully complete in this manner given that there is a lot of faction grinding involved. However with the mainline content I have been extremely strict in this nature. I completed all 150 levels worth of original content doing the trip from Daggerfall to Dominion to Ebonheart before touching any of the expansion content.
Now I have a stack of content waiting on me and honestly… that isn’t a bad spot to be in. So often with MMORPGs I am a content locust and can easily gobble up all of the available content leaving me with a feeling of nothing left to do. However the content in Elder Scrolls online is so dense and story driven that I can only handle doing so much of it before I need to go play something else for awhile. The end result is that ESO is a game that I can seemingly constantly return to and experience fresh story driven content that has piled up and is waiting on me. Now I tend to stay subbed pretty much permanently so I can pop in and out at will. I cannot play the game without the magical reagent storage bag, because I like looting pretty much every object that crosses my path.
This is still a really damned good game, but all of that said… I still do think I prefer the story line that came with the original game the best. That is not to knock any of the expansion content, because it has all be excellent. I just prefer the core game flow of the old world. I realized there was a lot of gnashing of teeth and it was fashionable to hate on this game when it first released… but I loved it then and still love it now. It is like a comfy sofa that I can crawl back on at any point I like and take a nap. That might not be the best tagline ever for an MMORPG experience but it seems to have found a niche in my game play schedule that I keep returning to.
In what is seeming to be the continued tradition of writing disclaimers at the top of my blog posts. I am still fine even though everything around me seems to be going batshit crazy. I officially cannot travel to see my parents right now as the highway between me and them is blocked with flood water. In my suburb the water has receded, but the city of Tulsa proper is struggling. I am getting pulled into some support of the flood prep effort, which is why I did not blog at all Friday. I got up for work at 4 am and was in the office at 5:30… which left me no time at all for my traditional blogging.
Yesterday was of course a holiday here in the United States, and I contemplated writing a post… but could not bring myself to actually do so. Instead I more or less spent the weekend recuperating from the madness that has been our life over the last several weeks. Saturday night we had another string of Tornadoes, and there is a high chance that tonight will be a repeat of that process again. My wife just happened to be up and around at 1 am when the warnings started happening, so my slumber was briefly interrupted as we lay there in bed trying to determine if we need to worry about it. It managed to touch down in a few places but nowhere near us so we rolled over and went back to sleep… still leaving the television on just in case.
As far as gaming goes I have been all over the place. Some years ago I backed the Crowfall kickstarter, in part because it seemed like it was gaining a bunch of steam within the greater internet zeitgeist. I figured either I would really like the game or else it would at least give me a cheaper copy to try it as is often the case with kickstarter pricing. However over the period of time since Alpha went live the game itself has seemed more of a tech demo than an actual game Periodically I would poke my head in and think to myself “yup that is an unfinished mess” and move on with my life. This time however I am starting to see the early signs of a functional game, and as a result I spent more time playing it this weekend than I have to date.
Crowfall itself is this bizarre amalgam of Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online and Everquest Landmark all sorta rolled into a single game that neither explains itself nor really gives much in the way of breadcrumbs as to how you should be approaching it. As a result I personally found myself perplexed by the game each time I had logged into it in the past, and this time I resorted to actually watching a tips and tricks video to somewhat ease the transition into the mindset required to be playing it. Effectively there are three modes to play the game and each have their own specifics. Eternal Kingdoms is effectively sandbox mode where you have total control over the world and can fiddle around and build til your heart iscontent. God’s Reach is effectively newbie mode, which is a largely PVE experience that allows you to get a taste for how the game will feel. Campaign is the PVP conquest mode which resets every so often and pushes the players back to square one. At this point I have only dinked around with the first two modes, and my allergy to PVP will largely keep me out of the third mode for some time.
Where the comparison to Eve Online comes in is the fact that the game has decided to have offline skill progression. This means that probably the very first thing you should do in the game is decide to make a primary and a secondary path which will allow you to begin accumulating skills in a sort of alternate advancement system that is independent of your characters. I have no clue how fast this acquisition is, but it always feels like I have a ton of points anytime I have logged out of the game for awhile. Right now I am working my way through the Crafting and Combat basics… with a focus on crafting to in theory be able to build better stuff for myself.
The above image represents the tree within “Crafting Basics” and I am nowhere near maxing it out, which I assume is required to move on to the next sub tree in the master list posted two images above. All of the pips seems to largely focus on efficiency and success of the patterns, and over in the combat tree they largely focus on increasing your stats and less on granting abilities which are done at a per character level. Right now I have spent most of my time on a Guineacean Knight aka Sword and Board and a Stoneborn Champion aka the big axe wielding warrior. The one credit I have to give them is that the character models they have created are glorious. The character animations however leave a little something to be desired.
The gameplay largely involves a mix of combat and crafting and you sort out how to make yourself the tools necessary to navigate the world and its combat system. It all starts out by gathering wood which then allows you to make the most basic of crafting implements. From there you can work your way through tiers of materials and at least cobble together some basic armor, and once you find the next tier of uncommon materials and a crafting bench some decent armor. I’ve not encountered anything I would call a unique drop, and effectively everything seems to come from crafting. This is going to be a key point in a few moments.
Up until this point everything was a fairly pleasant experience, but the game was just about to hit me with a sucker punch. As I expanded out from the starter areas I started encountering more difficult monsters. At which point I stumbled across this trio of skeletons… and took my very first death. In Crowfall when you die apparently everything that you were carrying in your inventory and that was not equipped on your person stays at the point of your death in a grave marker form. In order to get back your stuff, you have to get back to wherever you died… and tediously loot your items one by one with no bulk loot option. If you read the forums this is designed to purposefully lead to some tension surrounding if you can successfully loot your corpse before trouble arrives.
I spent a good hour and a half trying to clear the camp of 3 skeletons… that if I was super careful I could split a single mob of that pack. I could not however managed to take down two of them at a time… which meant that I would ultimately die again… strand another tombstone and have to repeat the process. I finally Leeroy Jenkins’d my way into looting enough stuff off my corpse to be able to get started again, but I have to say the entire experience put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. That said… once I got back some basic crafting tools there really was nothing on my body that I could not get back given enough time harvesting which I guess is the one golden takeaway from the experience. Death is a loss of time and opportunity, but doesn’t really do anything to permanently impact your progression.
There are a lot of titles that are nostalgic about various aspects of games gone by. Crowfall is very much a game that is nostalgic about the realm versus realm game play of Dark Age of Camelot and having to do corpse runs. That is not at all something I am nostalgic about other than being able to tell the gamer version of “in my day” stories about how rough we had it. Death is a bad enough set back… I just don’t feel like we need additional penalties tacked onto it, especially when it effects the items that I had spent the previous two hours of game play fastidiously assembling. Ultimately I find what Crowfall is doing interesting… but I also figure at this point it is pretty certain that the game that exists is not really in my wheelhouse.
All of that said… I am glad the game is progressing and has turned into something more than a tech demo. I will continue to watch it evolve into whatever it is planning on becoming. It isn’t really my jam but I figure it is someones out there. If you have deep nostalgia over the way Dark Age of Camelot used to be, then you might want to check it out. Otherwise you can just keep watching me as I poke my head back in periodically.
Last night I had a bit of a pleasant surprise, in that I came home and noticed that Rage 2 in my Bethesda launcher had 30 minutes left on the countdown to being ready to play. I was fully expecting it to unlock somewhere around midnight, meaning that I would not be playing it last night at all. However in theory the Bethesda launcher unlocked the game at the earliest playable time instead of Steam which I believe unlocked it at Midnight Eastern Standard time. Quake Champions alpha was the game that got me to install the Bethesda Launcher so when Fallout 76 forced me to use it… it was no big deal given that I already had it installed on my system. For Rage 2… it just seemed like a decent idea to go ahead and order directly from the company for fear of there being some last minute storefront shenanigans like there have been recently with the Epic Games store. One thing that you have to know going into this discussion… I loved the original Rage, just felt that it was too short of a game that felt like the opening act of a story and not a complete experience.
So going into Rage I was already familiar with the basic story of how the world went wrong. That said… I do think they did a good job of prefacing the major points through some slightly unreliable narration. Given that if you have not played Rage yet you like area not going to… so here goes my quick rundown of the events as I remember them. Essentially a planet-killer scale meteor named Apophis fell and destroyed the world… and you are one of the representatives of mankind’s best hope that were buried in Arks underground in order to survive the impact. However on the way to earth the meteor bounced off of the moon causing a large chunk to break off… and also causing the impact to not be quite as devastating as originally predicted. So in the first game you encounter survivors of the old world both good and bad… and fight your way through the paramilitary power of the time called the Authority and trigger all of the other Arks to rise to the surface in the final events of that game. However at some point between those events and that of Rage 2 some terraforming satellites have fallen to earth and caused pockets of the world to become a lush oasis… as was in theory the goal of Project Eden to help reclaim the broken world.
There is a thirty year gap between the events of Rage 1 and Rage 2 and in that time a number of major settlements have arisen and solidified their hold on the world. You play as your choice of a male or female character from the Settlement of Vineland. Within moments of starting the game you are thrust into a battle with the Authority that is now returning after a lengthy absense to begin reclaiming the wastes for themselves. Through a somewhat creepy sequence you scavenge a set of ranger armor from a dead body and that is apparently all it takes to make you one? You are sent out on a mission to make contact with three other city states and start something called Project Dagger going. And thus begins the first of the comparisons to Fallout… in that from the moment you leave that tutorial sequence you are no longer fettered by any constraints as to what you should or should not be doing.
Just like your first footsteps out of the vault… you can roam the world freely and do anything that suits your fancy. You have markers on your map directing you to each of these major settlements but also a bunch of other micro objectives that will gain you favor with various entities. The original Rage was essentially “what if Fallout were more like Quake”, and this game is more like “what if Fallout were a better shooter”. I am somewhat cautious on the Fallout comparisons however because Bethesda games are massively different for each of the players that choose to play them. For me that core Fallout experience is going off into the wilderness to be a murder hobo and bring back stacks of blood drenched armor to sell for caps… and then repeating this over and over until I have explored every bit of the world that suits my fancy and done all of the quests associated with them. In those terms Rage 2 feels very Fallout to me, because I can roam around the map and tick off objectives while looking for tasty loot.
Much like the first game you have a trusty steed in the form of a Mad Maxian road war vehicle… this time around it is something called Phoenix equipped with an Alexa style AI that talks to you as you do things. The game also gives you a decent waypoint system that shows up in game as a series of neon pink chevrons directing you towards your target. While on the road there are a number of random encounters… bandit camps of sorts or other vehicles that might try and run you off the road. One of the first objectives that you encounter is a bridge that has been blocked off by bandits and you need to clear the camp and flip a lever to raise the roadblock. That is more or less the sort of level involvement you should expect from the encounters in game… more or less go to an area… murder everything… search for hidden loot boxes and then profit. If Fallout was a deep role-playing experience for you… then maybe Rage 2 won’t feel like a reasonable simulacrum.
For me however the world is interesting and filled with quest givers that want me to help them out either to retrieve items or get much needed revenge on someone who did them or their family wrong. The feel of the world is also excellent, and not at all what I was expecting given the trailers and neon punk aesthetic leading up to the release of this game. Sure there are hot pink flares burning in the distance at times, but the world itself feels significantly more subdued and is filled with the sort of broken people you would expect from a broken landscape. There are no dialog prompts… just click on an NPC and get their story as well as a quest showing up in your journal… which admittedly is perfectly fine for me. I am always going to be the hero and help everyone out… so it isn’t like I need a red or blue option to the dialog to make me happy. That said for some the game will feel like it isn’t giving you any options other than killing everything… but again… it is a shooter first and anything else second.
Probably the most interesting aspect of the game is that each Ark can teach you a super power of sorts. From the first Ark located in Vineland you learn the ability to dodge out of the way of things… which comes in handy in many places. Last night before I shut down for the evening I found an Ark that effectively taught me the ability to double jump, and before that another one that taught me how to take my dodge and turn it into a body slam that can break armor off enemies. All of the abilities have their own skill tree of sorts that allows you to pour resources find in the wastes into leveling them up. As you start gaining these the game begins to feel really interesting and unique in that you are given was to both traverse the world but also interact with its combat. Now so far it is nothing in the way of the types of movement Tam generally craves… but double jump should at least make Ash as happy as it does me. I deeply appreciate the fact that the game has a ledge system that allows you to pull up if you get close enough to it… meaning that traversing areas that at first glance that you might not be able to make becomes a little bit more reasonable.
All in all I am deeply pleased with the experience so far, and all I really wanted in truth was more of the first game. Rage 2 however gives me enough tweaks to make that prospect significantly more interesting. The challenge the game has in front of it however is that so far… the game plays NOTHING like the trailer. The trailers were all so over the top and filled with Neon Punk aesthetic and thus far at least… I have seen very little of it apart from the occasional colored flare. The trailers would make me expect that a rainbow shat on my screen… and so far at least that isn’t exactly the case as you can see from what is a pretty common vista of junk strewn across a wasteland. This might be a turn off for folks expecting the former… for me personally I am completely fine with this as like I said before I loved the original.
I mean I guess the screenshots get a little more over the top when you factor in the photo mode that you can apply to things and add all sorts of neon nonsense to the sides. However that same aesthetic doesn’t really carry over to the gritty world that I have been experiencing. If you like playing murder hobo in Bethesda games… then Rage 2 might be a game for you. If you like post apocalyptic gopher mission shooters… then Rage 2 might be a game for you. If you want deep role-playing choices and feeling like you have some effect on the story… then Rage 2 might not be a game for you. If you were expecting a carnal bullet ballet in a neon punk wasteland… then it is probably a coin flip if this game will be for you because there are definitely those elements but as I said before it is nowhere near as over the top as the trailers would lead you to believe. For me personally… this is a positive but it won’t be for everyone.
I will say that the latest trailers for the game are playing down the elements from the earlier ones… so MAYBE the style changed over time? It is a really fun game that I am definitely enjoying, and if what I talked about seems interesting to you then maybe check it out. I am not about to say the game is going to be for everyone, but for me… I am completely down for this nonsense.
