Lost My Damned Mind

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Friends I have very clearly lost my damned mind. Originally I was planning on playing some Guild Wars 2 tonight because I would not have access to the downstairs television where the PlayStation 5 is connected. As a result all day I was planning on playing some more Horizon Forbidden West and moving forward with knocking some of the side quests out. Instead as it was fated I ended up having a late afternoon conversation with a friend about my struggles with Guild Wars 2. The problem for me is that “Warrior” has always meant tanky and the Guild Wars 2 warrior just does not feel tanky to me. So I went through this entire diatribe of explaining what I wanted out of a class and I got an answer I was not expecting.

Essentially my friend said that while I would not like the class fantasy of it… that it really sounded like I wanted to play a Reaper Necromancer which is the Greatsword based elite specialization that came with Heart of Thorns. I already had a Necromancer, but he is a Char… and I have to admit I don’t love Char for the same reason that I don’t love Tauren. They feel slow and lumbering, which is ironic given that when I re-rolled the class I also went with a large race… my favorite of the GW2 races… the Norn. So instead of spending a night in Horizon Forbidden West, I created a brand new character and returned to Guild Wars 2… a game with which I have an exceptionally checkered past. The initial problem is that even starting down the Reaper path is going to require me to grind out a bunch of Hero points, so ultimately I needed to learn how to play Necromancer in default mode.

Where things go really off the rails however is that Thalen who happened to be online mentioned that the WVW daily quest was really easy today. One of the required components was something that could just be purchased cheaply in the Guild Hall. In truth I have only participated in WVW once or twice in the entirety of Guild Wars 2 and the last instance I specifically remember is when I joined Liore and a few others and all joined together around the time the game launched. Suffice to say I am a newbie in such things… and as a result I asked an innocent question. “How the heck do I get access to my mount in WvW?”. This friends is an answer that ultimately dominated t he rest of my evening.

It began simple enough, that I had to rank up once and then purchase the Warclaw Mastery track. Then I had to complete that track, along with completing a collection of items that can only be found in WvW. That sounded easy enough, but essentially I legitimately spent the rest of the evening in WvW. That is enough time to see one skirmish finish and another skirmish get to about the halfway point. The truth is… while I suck at PVP interaction… the entire experience was pretty great. There are enough things going on in the map that much like Alterac Valley you can hang back and do useful things even if you are not with the vanguard charging up against the major objectives. Before I knew it I was starting to knock out these collection bits. For anyone who comes along before me… this is what is needed to complete the Warclaw Mount Collection:

  • Emblem – You get this through unlocking the Warclaw Mastery track
  • Tail Armor – This comes from defeating and looking any Veteran guarding an objective. Seems to have a non-100% drop chance.
  • Horn Spikes – Participate in the capture anything flagged as an enemy camp.
  • Saddle – Participate in the capture of one of the enemy towers.
  • Gorget – Participate in the capture of one of the enemy keeps.
  • Leg Armor – Purchased for 250 Badges of Honor from the Warclaw Tender
  • Body Armor – Purchased for 50 WvW Skirmish Tickets from the Warclaw Tender
  • Helmet – Gained from completing the entire Warclaw Mastery Track.

Lastly after doing ALL of this you need to go back to the Warclaw Tender and purchase your license for 8 gold. After that you have a new mount that you can use to zip around the battlefield in WvW. I believe you can also ride it out in the wild, but any of the mastery upgrades only really apply to PVP.

At the end of the night I managed to gather up 5 of the 8 armor pieces needed for the Warclaw Companion collection. Of the few that I am missing, the one that really concerns me is the Gorget gained through capturing a Keep. All night I was not able to find a map that had a keep that someone was trying to capture for team blue, seeing as Yaks Bend is paired with another server group to represent that faction currently. The body armor should be gained pretty quickly, I think I am 3 WvW tickets shy of being able to pick that up. Lastly the mastery track is just going to take a lot more WvW in order to get. I need to go rifling through my bank because I am almost certain to have some WvW tokens that I can burn through.

So there you have it friends. I set out with the mission of trying out Reaper for the Necromancer… and made zero progress towards that goal. Instead I wound up down this rabbit trail of trying to get access to a mount in WvW in order to make the daily quests go quicker. I am not proud of myself and I am confused about who I even am… seeing as I am supposedly allergic to PVP. I am even more confused that I actually found myself enjoying my currently pure caster Necromancer. I like my army of disturbing looking pets that I can explode for extra damage. I might need an intervention because I am not even sure who I am at this point.

If you find yourself playing GW2 however, I am over on Yaks Bend which does not really matter and you can friend me up with “belghast.5496”. I saw a lot of familiar faces like Ardua, Lvrfmsc, Rowan, and Sctrz at which point I remembered… oh yeah this is where they hang their hats these days. I was mostly quiet other than talking in guild chat to Thalen however, because I was apparently a man on a mission… just not the mission I had originally started on. It was a weird night, but a mostly enjoyable night.

Adventures in Plex DVR

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Last night was one of those nights where I had the desire to play something, but lacked the energy to actually make it happen. As a result this morning I thought I would talk a bit about one of my “weird shit bel does” side projects. Now some backstory… I have been an avid user of Plex for well over a decade and have been a Plex Pass holder for almost as long as that program existed. For the uninitiated, Plex is a home media server that just keeps getting more useful and acts as a unifying force to glue all of your personal media together in a single app. Thanks to Plex Pass I have access to all of my home media securely and remotely no matter where I happen to be. I don’t even have a bluray or dvd player in my home entertainment set up, and instead rip the media directly to my network attached storage where the Plex server picks it up. There is a constant theme in my life that I hate fiddling with discs… and in truth that is a large reason why I have been digital only with purchases for the last few console generations and the last PC game I purchased in physical form was TERA in 2011.

In 2016 Plex added the ability to record over the air television with its own built in DVR functionality. I’ve always been curious about this but never jumped through the hoops in order to get it up and running. Our house has been wired for cable the entire time it has existed, and as such never had a proper high gain antenna. So essentially in order to make this work you need a television capture device and an antenna, two things I did not have readily available. I am not exactly sure what put this idea in my head, but over the last few months I have conspired to make this happen and play with it. I think in part it was when I set my parents television up with a new digital antenna and seeing just how many channels existed, and how shockingly clear the picture quality was. One of the things that I do not love about cable DVR systems is that I can’t save that file off to network storage. Plex effectively fills in that gap allowing me to record any shows I care about from broadcast television.

Now when it comes to acquiring a solution to record over the air television, you can quickly spend a lot of money. If you followed the recommended path, you would end up spending upwards of $300 to get the set up running. Instead I did a modicum of research and tried to do it on the cheap. Essentially I did not want to shell out much money without knowing if the process was going to work. This meant going to ebay and trying to find the best bang for my buck. In total I spent about $40 on the set up I have now, and the end result is shockingly good. The first piece of this equation was the capture card and for that I went with the Hauppage WinTV-HVR 950Q. It is capable of receiving a full 1080i signal and has fully supported Windows 10 drivers. The negative however is that it only has a single tuner, which means like early DVR boxes you can only be recording a single show at a time.

As far as the Antenna, after some research I decided to go with this design the Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse Amplified Multi-directional TV Antenna. There are three or four common designs for indoor antennas and based on reading and watching review videos I landed on this one because it seemed the most consistent. I currently have this mounted on my office wall using four small 3M Command Adhesive tabs rather than the permanent mounting medium that was provided. The truth is I hooked everything up, installed the Windows 10 drivers for the capture device, and Plex immediately recognized it.

In the Plex interface I provided the zip code that I live in, and it auto retrieved the channel guide information for all of the channels I was capable of picking up. You can go into the interface and determine which channels you care about, for example I am not listing the shocking number of random Christian broadcasting channels. I probably should make another culling pass because I believe I have some shopping channel as well that is still in the mix. From here you have the option of a grid like shown above, or a show by show based interface showing what is on within the next few hours.

For the moment I am using it to record the handful of network shows that I care about. For example this is a recording from the CBS show Ghosts, and demonstrates the quality of the broadcast. One word of warning however about this sort of set up is by default the file that is generated is massive. The stream is encoded as MPEG-2 compressed audio and video and stored in a TS file. This relatively low level of compression means that an hour of television ends up being around 3 gigabytes worth of diskspace. Currently I am taking these files and running them through Handbrake to convert them into MPEG-4 which shrinks that same example file size down to around 800 megabytes. At some point I will create a script that executes after a show has finished recording to do the compression for me automagically. For the time being however I am just pleased it works as cleanly as it does.

The setup works extremely well currently for what it is, and the very limited channels that I can receive over the air. If I wanted to upgrade the configuration it would involve moving to a completely different scenario involving getting a Cable card from my provider and setting up something like an HD HomeRun box which would give me access to all of the cable channels we subscribe to. For now I am happy with this little experiment and happy that I only spent $40 to make it happen. Why did I do it when I already had access to the shows I am recording? I just sometimes get dumb ideas stuck in my head and go forward with them.

Legacy of the MMO

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Good Morning Friends! I am still very much enshrined in my current play-through of Horizon Forbidden West. At this point I am somewhere between 40 and 50 hours into the game and still have so many little side objectives to finish. There are some that I don’t really look forward to like the hunting grounds… largely because I hate gimmick fights. Then there are others like the Tallnecks that I have just been avoiding because it slows down the action as I try and figure out how to jump up on top of them. I need to focus on completing those however because generally speaking a whole slew of things that I didn’t even know about open up. The story continues to be super interesting and while on some level it mostly just feels like I am playing Zero Dawn, there are so many general quality of life improvements.

It was one of these that started a twitter thread yesterday. Something that Horizon Forbidden West does that I adore is that it puts a little thought bubble exclamation mark over the head of any of your companions that have new dialog options. Something that I have always found exhausting about RPGs in general… and most specifically Bioware RPGs, is the need to keep checking in with your crew to determine if you can make any forward story progress with them. Essentially the old adage is that after every single quest you need to run around and talk to everyone, just to make sure nothing has opened up because you certainly do not want to miss it. With Horizon Forbidden West not only do you get an indicator that there is something new, but you also get an indicator on the specific dialog tree you can find the new information.

I had a friend try and share his frustrations with this style of mechanic twice, only to end up deleting the messages. Essentially it went down to something like this… that he hated to see MMORPGs bleeding over into single player games. So it made me think, is the lasting impact of the MMO the quest giver? Since the advent of World of Warcraft it has become ubiquitous to see an exclamation point over something and immediately translate that into “they have a quest for me”. Personally I adore this because it gives a universal language that makes it easier and more efficient to navigate the world. However I think it largely comes down to which side of a discussion you are on. I am very much on team “Efficiency and Better Communication” with the player.

Then I think there is the opposite side of that coin which is team “Mystery and Immersion”. This team tends to dislike obvious quest markers out in the world because they draw them away from the immersion of living in the game world that they are playing. This is also the team that loves Diegetic Interfaces in games, where when you click on a screen the menu options appear on the in game screen and not some popup that happens in your heads up display. A lot of times this sort of player might prefer to turn off the HUD entirely to allow for only in world queues to guide them. Based on the two deleted attempts at a comment, I am guessing my friend falls in that camp, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play the game. Personally in truth… I think both options should exist and often times when a game does not support them… I install mods that give me back my better visualization elements.

This however got me thinking, and I firmly believe that the true legacy of the MMO is not the quest giver system, but instead the codification of color coded loot systems. In 2020 I wrote a piece attempting to divine the origins of these systems. While there has been quite a lot of shifting over the years as to what color means what rarity, we have more or less stabilized on a specific standard moving forward. The more games that I find myself playing, the more I am seeing this exact scale repeated over and over. Currently I am playing Horizon Forbidden West, Dying Light 2, and Lost Ark and in all cases the scale is alive and well.

  • Grey – Junk
  • White – Base Rarity
  • Green – Common
  • Blue – Rare
  • Purple – Epic
  • Yellow/Orange – Legendary

It truly is staggering just how common this loot system ends up being in modern games. This sort of thing has happened over the years with different systems and arriving at a “solved” state. Prior to the early 2000s for example, there were some wildly different solutions to how to do three dimensional movement in a video game. Then almost as if at once, we coalesced upon a standard for how third person movement in a video game should function. Similarly over the years we have arrived at what appears to be the best solution to easily giving the player visualization that an item you just picked up, might be better than the item you were previously using. I personally think this is a positive thing, but poor team immersions is going to ultimately find the walls closing in on them as we get better visualizations.

The other lasting impact of the MMO that I have seen starting to trickle into other sorts of experiences is that of the Item Level. Ultimately every single item created in a game has some sort of item budget, that denotes how many attribute points are granted by using it. For years this was an opaque system, but that did not mean it was not there. World of Warcraft, and more specifically the modding community created a way to transparently visualize this number and give a reference that this item had a larger item budget which was quantifiable. That did not necessarily make that item better, because some stats mean more than other stats, but it did assign some numbers to an obtuse system. It is very weird to see this same concept being applied to otherwise single player experiences. It is not necessarily a system I would have carried forward, because it can be the source of bullying, but I guess anything that helps a player better interpret the value of gear is not completely awful.

So I am now curious. What other systems have you seen trickling out of the MMO space into Single Player games? Drop me a line below and lets talk about whether or not you find them good changes.

Review Culture is Broken

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This morning I am going to reprise a topic that we discussed on AggroChat over the weekend. Because I have specific thoughts on this I decided to attempt to dive into it in my morning post. Of note I write these starting around 6 am in the morning, so not everything may come out as intended. Essentially this past week Elden Ring released and it is quite possibly the highest rated game that has ever been released in the history of video games. There is a problem with this, and it is not that Elden Ring is not a good game and it is not that the PC version has significant performance issues. Instead it is a problem with the way games are being reviewed in general.

Video game critique lives in a really strange place given that for the most part all subjective media that gets reviewed has a relatively fixed amount of time to play through it. A movie review requires at most a few watchings of the film on an average of two hours per commitment. If you are reviewing music, it might require you to listen to several tracks more than once but again… after a few hours of listening you have compiled enough to write a very thorough review. Big open world video games however can easily consume upwards of two hundred hours of play time to really see everything there is to see in them.

Generally speaking however video game reviewers are not paid for any of the hours that they spend playing the video games. They are instead paid for the final product, the article published on the website with a embargo date associated with it. For Elden Ring that embargo was the 23rd of February and I’ve seen a few comments that reviewers got their copy of the game four days ahead of that. That means a reviewer has maybe two days to pour 60+ hours into a game and then write a well crafted review of the title and get it on the site and edited before the review embargo lifts. Everyone is fighting for the same eyeballs and if you don’t have that review on the same day as everyone else… then you lose out on those readers.

The end result is that the writer who is the most passionate about a given title is often the one who ends up getting access to it. If you are not getting paid for that 60 to 100 hour play-through… then you have to be willing to do it for the pure joy of the experience. Dark Souls in general has always been a divisive game with players tending to either love it completely, or not really understanding the hype and bounce off it quickly. So in that sort of climate Elden Ring is released, a title that is very firmly a Dark Souls game… and we have this happen. For a good chunk of the day that the game released it was tracking with a Metacritic of 100%. Why did it get all of these 10 out of 10 perfection reviews? Well it was reviewed largely by critics who were already bought into the experience of a Dark Souls game and had been waiting with anxiously for this title since it was first announced at the Microsoft 2019 E3 show.

Dissenting opinions are now starting to surface, but for the most part if you read any press those first few days you were going to assume that Elden Ring was a mus play experience. However it is very much a Dark Souls game, and will be just as divisive of an experience as any of those games. It has been called the most accessible soulsborne game, which is probably true… but it is a long way from being widely accessible to anyone who is not already bought into that franchise. If you know you are not a big fan of Souls games, then it is very likely that you are going to similarly not be a huge fan of Elden Ring. That is not to say it is a bad game, but I would personally put it probably in the 7 out of 10 to 8 out of 10 range. It is not a perfect game and truthfully launched on the PC is an exceptionally rough state with extremely high performance rigs hitting freezes in combat.

The Metascore has come down a bit and the user score is tracking in firmly mixed territory. The game was “mixed” on steam for much of the weekend… that is until it was reported and a number of one word positive reviews filed in to shift the balance to “mostly positive” territory. Metacritic itself is a problem with things like performance bonuses being tied to specific scores so that employees are actively harmed when a game reviews poorly. Video games have the same “5 stars or bust” culture that the hospitality and service industries seem to. The thing is… 7/10 games are often times the games that really stick with you because they are doing something interesting and different or are nuanced in their approach. Reviews also used to mean more than they do now… because a single reviewer can never give a full picture of the game. However when you are handing out the sole review copy to only the folks who are already bought into the shared culture of that game experience… you are going to end up with a lot of reviews that sound the same.

Once again I am going to drag the holy grail of video game review magazines into this discussion. I was a huge fan of EGM growing up… or Electronic Gaming Monthly. I used to await anxiously for each new copy to show up on the news state and later I begged my parents to get a subscription to it for me. When they reviewed a game it was handed out to four different fixed personalities, each submitting their own score. The official rating for the game was a blended average, but ultimately there was usually one of the reviewers that you found more kinship with and when they gave their score it was speaking more to your interests. This is the way that video game reviews should be done, and were all things equal… and each site an independent voice with their own tastes and willingness to show those tastes in reviews the holistic picture of game reviews would shake out to being something like this.

Instead each publication is fighting for your attention, and review copies are not something that is guaranteed. If you write too many bad reviews of a publisher, they can and have in several cases… just happen to forget to send out review copies to a specific publication. That publication misses out on the wave of google search results as folks scour the internet looking for information about a specific game and are ultimately punished for having shared their truth. Hell I have written a review before that was deemed not positive enough to see print, because the publisher in question was an advertiser. The scales are stacked unevenly right now in the favor of the publisher, because there are always going to be folks on social media willing to give praise to a title in exchange for a free key. In the EGM era there were only a handful of publications that covered games, so the publishers needed that press and were way more willing to accept a bad review.

So in the end I am not saying that Elden Ring is a bad game. I am however saying that it is far from a perfect game. The only way this game becomes a perfect game is if it is being reviewed in a deeply biased environment. It might be a game that is perfect for you, or perfect for a Dark Souls fan… but when you write a review you should be speaking to ALL players not just your chosen tribe. Souls games for whatever reason are the media darling for critics, which is in part why it is a meme to compare everything to being the “dark souls of X” genre. Again this is fine if there are enough publications out there giving differing opinions to have the blended average give a more genuine picture. However right now it feels like every single publication gave their one review copy to “the souls guy” and as a result we have this wildly lopsided situation we find ourselves in.

Video game reviews should be better. This is not a new situation we find ourselves in and honestly in large part why I take every review with a boulder of salt. The truth is my review structure is more aligned to individual friends that I know… and that they know my tastes and preferences. I will always take a word of mouth suggestion far more viably than anything I read in print or watch in a video. It cuts through all of the awkward financial incentives because a friend only really has their love of a game and their desire to share it as their mission. Electronic Gaming Monthly was very much a product of the 90s and there are some deeply troubling things that were printed within those pages. However I will always be nostalgic for the way that they reviewed games and I would love to see something like the newly resurrected G4 take on the challenge of a 4 person review panel. That won’t happen however so long as we are expecting reviews to donate hundreds of hours of unpaid time to writing that review.