Underwhelmed

Mixed Emotions

ffxiv_dx11 2015-11-16 18-59-42-90

One of the big problems with last week is that quite literally I had too many things I wanted to play.  Not only did Fallout 4 release… and give me a franchise of shanty towns to look after….  we also had the launch of Final Fantasy XIV 3.1 patch.  Now I have complained a bit that the lag between 3.0 and 3.1 was entirely too long.  Basically from 2.1 onwards they kept a schedule along the lines of a major patch every 3 months and a minor patch every month.  Instead this patch took about five months to release… and it was a long enough lag to get me completely out of the habit of logging in on a regular basis.  That said I knew whenever 3.1 landed I would be back, albeit a bit rusty from lack of playing.  Fallout however took precedence and over the last two nights I have finally consumed I believe all of the new quest content.  Now we get to the mixed emotions part… because in one way the content was really damned good.  It managed to hit us in the feels a few  times and introduce a new to this game character… that we are VERY familiar with from Final Fantasy V thanks to Ashgar and his constant cheerleading for the Four Job Fiesta.  The problem I am having is it did nothing really to re-ignite my desire to log in on a nightly basis.

The other big take away I had from the story content is it felt like a trickle compared to what we have seen in the past.  I know at the very least the quest to unlock Void Ark was significantly shorter and less involved than the quest to unlock Crystal Tower.  Similarly the main story line, lacked a big boss fight like they have in the past… because there was no introduction of a new primal.  Also part of what I think is the feeling of it being small… is the fact that we did not get a Hildebrand story to go with it.  So while I enjoyed the experience of the new quest content…  I felt like it was over far too quickly, and took part of an evening to complete in total.  That is including unlocking the new Vanu Vanu beast tribe quests and done two rounds of those.  I don’t want to have this “let down” feeling but I can’t help it I guess.  Maybe it is just that I had built up 3.1 as being this point of my grand return to this game…  and like Tam has said in the past we simply lack the huge backlog of content to slowly work our way through that we had during 2.0.  Maybe there has always been a very limited amount of content… and I just never actually caught up completely until this expansion.

The Dungeons

ffxiv_dx11 2015-11-16 19-48-25-06

All of this said… I have yet to do the two new dungeons, and have yet to run Void Ark, so maybe my feelings will be different after seeing those.  Dungeons have always been the lifeblood of the game for me, but I have simply not been sleeping well the last few nights, so I felt more than a little out of it.  Also Tam spent time playing Lords of Verminion last night, and I am hoping he writes up a quick guide because what I saw of it… looked like madness, but a fun sort.  Mostly I just need to get back into the habit of logging in on a regular basis.  I was in last night at least long enough to run my Vanu Vanu dailies before disappearing back into the Commonwealth, and at a minimum I plan to be doing that each night.  I want my flying snake and I want my sundrop dance.  I spent some of my stockpiled MGP one one of the new dances there as well… the “Gold” dance, which looks hilarious when my Lalafell does it.  I also need to get back in the swing of tanking, because I was a complete slacker when it came to esoterics gear, and I need an awful lot of it.  I also need to start running Void Ark to get items to upgrade with.

ffxiv_dx11 2015-11-16 21-30-46-21

Is it wrong that I feel a little disappointed though?  Maybe it just feels like a let down after the amazing ride that Heavensward was, and maybe the patch content is on par with what they have done in the past.  Final Fantasy XIV has always been this happy place, and logging into the free company brings that point home.  It is amazing that the guild has managed to keep trucking on and being active in spite of a large chunk of us taking an extended break from the game.  I was just so ready to hop back in the saddle and be wowed by the experience… and instead I feel a bit melancholy about it.  It just feels like the team might be resting on their laurels a bit, and maybe spent too much time working on Verminion that would have been better suited putting in more content for the patch.  It really bothers me that there is only two dungeons in this patch cycle, because the whole Fractal/Neverreap thing got super old… super fast.  Having only two dungeons means there is the one you enjoy… and the one you don’t…  and it always feels like the only thing you get is the one you don’t enjoy.  For us it was non-stop back to back Neverreap, and my fear is that once we start the dungeon cycle one of them is absolutely going to be “That” dungeon for us again.  It is funny how much of a difference that extra dungeon seems to make… but man it does.  Maybe they will add another dungeon in with 3.15 which is supposedly right around the corner.  My hope is that they will also be adding more Hildebrand content… with another boss fight, and potentially a new primal.  Mostly I guess it just feels like we got half of a patch, which makes me a little sad after the length five month wait.

 

Week In Gaming 9/20/2015

Allergies Suck

This week has been a tale of the universe conspiring to kill me… otherwise known as horrible horrible pollen count.  When you go to one of those sites that tracks air quality, my neck of the woods has been bright red for the last several weeks.  As a result I have been walking around in a bit of a stupor.  Friday I felt like I was coming out from behind a fog, but this morning after running around yesterday I am once again feeling miserable.  Essentially it seems like my best option is to huddle inside and forget the world outside exists.  The biggest problem I have is that the only allergy treatment that seems to really work is Benedryl…  which puts me to sleep.  So as a result I take a cocktail of other medications in the hopes of blunting most of the things going on… and then combining that with copious amounts of caffeine in the hopes that somehow someway I will be able to function as an adult.  Adulting is really damned hard sometimes.  In spite of all of my time hunkered down this week, I really don’t have a wide variety of things to talk about.

Star Wars the Old Republic

swtor 2015-09-19 18-28-31-84
Treek is a Badass

Once again this week my primary source of gaming entertainment has been Star Wars the Old Republic.  As I mentioned last week during the recording of the AggroChat podcast I started working on my Smuggler, and I have continued that process throughout the week.  As of last night I am now on Alderaan and level 34.  The extremely level gap that I had on the content is starting to shrink and as a result things are getting more difficult.  I need to look up and see when the next upgrades are available because I am starting to feel like I need to spend some commendations on both myself and Treek to get some more gear.  I had been trying to do this every other level range, so that I skip one upgrade step but the levels have not been coming nearly as fast as they were on Taris and Nar Shadda.  I am however rolling in the commendations because they just seem to keep coming quickly.

I am absolutely enjoying the smuggler storyline because it feels so vastly different than any of the other storylines I had experienced.  The Jedi Knight and Jedi Consular stories interweave as you go throughout the game, but it seems like the Trooper and Smuggler don’t really work this way.  I am very much on my own mission through the galaxy with my own cast of characters to interact with.  I am still really happy I made my choice to go with Treek over Corso Riggs, because even listening to him running Crew Missions is enough for me.  I’ve managed to unlock three of the faction story bits with Treek and I am wondering if she has a special mission at the end or not.  She just seems genuinely happy to roam around the galaxy killing things, and I am happy to keep her in business.

Tron 2.0

lithtech 2015-09-19 15-07-17-14

Yesterday I went through the steps outlined in this video link to attempt to get Tron 2.0 up and running on a Windows 8.1 system.  It took a little bit of fiddling but I finally managed to get things running.  I have to admit right now I am struggling a bit, because quite honestly it feels like a decade old game.  The controls are not nearly as responsive as I have come to expect from a shooter, also it returns to an area without functional auto-save.  This means that yesterday I died…  after playing the game about an hour, realizing that the last time I had saved was during the tutorial when the game specifically asked me to do so.  The combination of wonky controls, and not having auto-save to lean on… is going to mean that I have to shift the way I think about the experience.  I’ve decided already that when I restart the game I will be lowering the difficulty and skipping the tutorial since I already saw it once.  Here is hoping that I can manage to get through it before the AggroChat show next week!

Final Fantasy XIV

ffxiv_dx11 2015-09-07 21-31-38-06

This is going to be the first week period that I have not actually logged into Final Fantasy XIV.  Allergies and generally feeling like shit kept me from raiding on both Monday and Wednesday nights, which was unfortunate.  I’ve been in this holding pattern waiting on the 3.1 release to come in and sweep me off my feet with overwhelming love for the game again.  However over the weekend at the Tokyo Game Show they announced that we can expect the 3.1 patch in November.  That seems a really long ways away… considering that people are desperate for content right now.  The only thing we can think is that maybe the pet battle system might be what is delaying it… but honestly it would seem like a much better call would be to bump pet battles to 3.2 and get some fresh content now.  This is precisely the problem we went through at the launch of 2.0 and ultimately why many of us quit playing when we did.  We got tired of grinding the same two dungeons over and over.  In the mean time  I will have SWTOR and Wildstar to entertainment.  I don’t plan on quitting the game, but I will probably not be playing a lot of it until November to be brutally honest.

Disney Infinity 3.0

Boba Fett is Overpowered

The other thing that I have started playing with yet again is Disney Infinity.  I managed to catch a silly deal on the Disney Infinity 3.0 set while only spending $15 out of my pocket on it.  This gave me the 3.0 base game with five figures… the exclusive Boba Fett and then Luke, Leia, Anakin, and Asoka.  The 3.0 interface itself is much refined from the 2.0 version and features an almost MMO like feel to it where you have various hubs in a persistent main world.  Additionally there seems to be some sort of arcade feature that allows you to connect to players around the world and play with them.  I have not really explored much other than talking to each of the quest givers off the main hub, and unlocking their specific area.  Boba Fett is pretty damned overpowered as he has rockets that pretty much destroy anything they hit.  The only negative that I see so far with the Star Wars characters is that unlike Iron Man or Thor none of them seem to have flight abilities.  I halfway expected that Boba Fett could use his jet pack, but instead that is just used as a sort of charge attack.  I am guessing that also means that most of the play sets will be built in a way where they don’t need flight in any fashion.  Right now there are really only the two playsets that I have seen for 3.0 but I am sure more will be coming shortly.