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Witcher 3 Impressions

May 21, 2015 by Belghast

Losing Time

Last night I had these plans of coming home, and hopping into Final Fantasy XIV and working on crafting once again while chatting away with my Free Company folk. However when I got home absolutely none of that actually happened. I had left the GOG Galaxy client up on my screen during the day, and when I sat down at my machine it was the first thing I saw. I had fixed myself a sandwich and chips and I thought to myself… I will just play Witcher for a bit while I eat dinner, and before my wife gets home. It seems like moments later she had gotten home and was hollering up at me. When I say it seems like moments, it quite literally feels like I had just sat down at the screen. In reality about an hour passed between starting Witcher and taking a quick pause to see my wife off to church before returning to playing again. Then next thing I know it… my wife is back home and heading to bed and I have managed to lose another several hours.

To say the game is immersive is a bit of an understatement. The last game that I can remember losing entire nights to was probably Skyim, and that is a fairly apt comparison at least on a few levels. The funny thing is I have just now moved to the “second” area of the game. I say area because while the game has open world aspects it is not exactly completely open world. The first “zone” is called White Orchard and it is made up of this huge sprawling seamless area with lots of villages and locations to explore. This gives it a traditional open world Elder Scrolls feel, the problem being that the entire location has a bounding border drawn around it. While I have not pushed my luck when the game starts telling me to turn around… I am imagining that there is some sort of “slaughterfish” like mechanic that you encounter.

Gorgeous Environment

The real triumph of the game is the environment, and just how real it feels to be roaming through. What makes the game world so compelling is the fact that everywhere you look there is action going on. Nothing is static, and the weather patterns effect every last blade of grass it feels. The only problem with this is at times you feel like you are suffering from a bit of sensory overload. Like I said yesterday once I started playing I pretty much hopped off the path immediately and this is very easy to do, and at the same time rewarding. When they were pitching this game I remember them saying that it would take either 20 hours or 200 hours depending on your gameplay style and after finishing White Orchard I can see why this is. The main storyline in the zone was relatively straight forward and only actually required me to complete a few quests to get through it. However I spent the next four hours working on various treasure hunts and exploring the world.

The map system works very similar to Skyrim except that you have missions of interest that you have yet to explore marked as question marks. Now these are not ALL the locations in the world, and there are a number of other “hidden” things that you can find wandering the countryside, however if you explore each question mark it seems like you will get most of the content you would care about. That is ultimately what I spent my night doing was wandering around completing these question marks. The game has a waypoint travel system that allows you to pop from road sign to road sign, and I used the hell out of this functionality allowing me to get close to the destination that I was looking for and either taking my horse the rest of the way or just wandering of foot. Pretty much anytime I saw monsters on my minimap hud I dismounted and took them on. After some gear and some levels things like the Drowners and packs of Wolves became trivial, but the big monsters were still insane especially anything that spawned near a “guarded treasure”.

The Story Is Good

The thing that I find most interesting is that the game manages to make the narrative just as interesting as the free form exploration. There is some crazy shit going on in the world of the Witcher, and as this game is my first experience of that world I am trying to soak it all in. The game does an awesome job of giving you just enough of a primer in the setting for things to make sense, but also is unapologetic at times for talking about things that you have NO clue what is going on. There was a point in the game where I had to answer a series of questions, each of which I think represent choices that were made in earlier games. Knowing nothing about the setting I made my choices and it was interesting to see just how they played out in that discussion. I have a feeling that those choices will ultimately color what the final results of the game end up being.

There was talk at one point of them rebooting the earlier Witcher games using the Witcher 3 engine… and I really hope this happens. The engine itself is extremely robust and I can see the modder community is going to have a ball with this game. This might dethrone Skyrim in that department, pending the game itself is that extensible. The best review that I can give the game is the fact that I had to pry myself away from it last night to go to sleep. I alt tabbed and noticed it was 10:30 and realized that if I did not stop then… I would likely end up playing until after one in the morning. The funny thing about this game is that it literally came out of left field for me. I had no intent to purchase it, and am only now playing it because I got a free copy with my video card. Now I am looking forward to playing through everything the game has to offer and will more than likely purchase the season pass so that I can play the DLC as it releases. I keep harkening back to this, but I think if the game keeps up at this pace and level of quality that it might very well be that go to game like Skyrim for losing myself in the world. The only fear I have is that since this is so narrative focused, I am not sure if it will have the same sort of universal replay-ability that the Elder Scrolls games have had for me.

Half Sleeping

May 17, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 57 – Preparing for Heavensward

Tonight we have Belghast, Ashgar, Tamrielo, Kodra and Thalen and once again we felt like we didn’t have much to talk about. However once we dug in a little bit I noticed a trend. Each of us was busy working on this item or that in relationship to Final Fantasy XIV each with our own goals that we have been trying to finish before the expansion. Ashgar just finished his Nexus weapon after the length grind, and talks about how it compared up against other grinds he has completed. Kodra talks about working on Turn 9 with two different raid groups and how he hopes we can get through it within the coming weeks. I talk about my own quest which involves me descending into the dark madness that is crafting and slowly stair stepping each and every crafting class five levels at a time.

In addition to this there is some more Shadowrun talk as we each continue our play throughs. Kodra goes into yet another dark place by playing some Demon Souls and talks about those experiences. He and Tam spent a good deal of time this week watching the first season of Sword Art Online and we get into a discussion about that as well. I talk about my experiences working on the Blackhand encounter in World of Warcraft, and we talk a bit about the lackluster numbers released by NCSoft regarding Wildstar sales. Yet another night of varied topics here on AggroChat.

Automotive Struggles

It is now officially “weather season” here in Oklahoma and over the last few weeks we have been deluged in rain storms. In fact we skipped Mother’s Day last weekend due to the fact that there was rampant flooding in the area of the state that our Mothers live in. This meant this weekend we had to make up for that fact and venture out to see all three mothers. Friday night we met my folks for dinner and chatted with them for a good while, and then Saturday we ventured to the northern part of the state to see my wife’s mothers. The only problem with this notion is that there was the constant fear of bad weather hanging over the day. The national weather service had used the term “life threatening” and “super cell” in relation to the storm that was supposed to be arriving that night. To make matters more tense we opted to drive my wife’s Pontiac Torrent because it is more comfortable on long trips. That said it has also been having some issues lately.

There is a point between second and third gear where it “chugs” for lack of a better term, or as my wife calls it “hiccups” while trying to change gears. This seems to hit most often on inclines but over time it has gotten worse. While driving north on the turnpike it happened again around 75 mph and this time had a corresponding check engine light. I pulled over to the side of the turnpike and shut down completely, and upon powering back on everything seemed happy. We were just outside of town, so we popped off and went to the local GMC dealer. While the service department was not open, the shop foreman just happened to be working on his mothers car and was able to at least hook up the Torrent to the computer and tell us what was happening. Turns out that the engine was misfiring and after some research there is a factory recall that we were never notified about. He promised that our vehicle would not strand us, but instead it would just get horrible gas mileage until we got it taken care of. Nonetheless with impending weather issues it made the rest of the day feel far more tense than it normally would have.

Half Sleeping

The national weather service originally predicted that a huge batch of Tornados would be hitting the Oklahoma City area around 3pm CST. The storm however stalled out over the state and by the time we started up the podcast last night it still had not fully hit us. The problem with a late night storm is that it pretty much destroys any semblance of sleep. Today I am completely dragging ass because we did not get the “All Clear” until about 4:30 in the morning. This means it was yet another night of sleeping with the television blaring the weather so that if something went horribly wrong over night we would hopefully hear it. Sleeping while half paying attention to the television means you don’t actually get much rest. I have a feeling I will be taking a nap at some point because right now I am struggling to get through my morning blogging routine, let alone do anything more productive. The good news is that for the most part we made it through the storm unscathed. The bad news is, that not every suburb in the Tulsa area can say the same thing.

The Broken Arrow area seems to have gotten hit the hardest from last night. Earlier on the news they showed footage of what like the remains of a trailer part strewn along the country roads. At that point the reporter was uncertain where exactly the debris was coming from, but there was a lot of it. My hope is that everyone made it out alive. It is always surreal to talk about Tornados because they are equal parts commonplace and revered here in Oklahoma. Everyone knows someone who has been effected by one in the past, but at the same time… when you spend every spring dealing with the warnings it also seems “commonplace”. For years I used to wonder how the folks on the west coast dealt with Earthquakes, but since we also have those… I am guessing it is much the same. When you are used to a natural disaster, it just becomes a bit less scary. Right now it seems like most of the issues happening today are just massive flooding. After years of drought, I had almost forgotten what “real” rain was like. At this point all of the rivers are well over flood stage, but fortunately I don’t live in an area that actually floods. Expect normal gaming blog posts to resume this week I hope, but today… was all about the weather.

Back But Don’t Play

May 11, 2015 by Belghast

Supporting Kickstarter

This morning I am going to tackle the second talkback topic for the Newbie Blogger Initiative because it is actually one that has been on the hearts and minds of the AggroChat folks for the last few weeks. For the April AggroChat Game Club game I chose Darkest Dungeon, and since then the topic of playing “unfinished” games has been somewhat of a recent discussion among us in private. The fact that the game was unfinished caused numerous problems, not the least of which was the simple fact that we were never quite sure if this or that functionality was intended… or just unfinished. So I feel like I was not able to give it a really solid testing, because I don’t know what might change between now and when the studio deems the game “finished”. The prompt however for this talkback is pretty straight forward but my answer is going to be a bit more nuanced.

Early Access and Kickstarter – Do you support unfinished games?

So for the first part… yes I wholeheartedly support the backing of unfinished games. I’ve backed more than I can count at this point through either Kickstarter or company specific initiatives. I think Kickstarter is a pretty awesome thing, and it has caused a lot of things that I care about to see the light of day. I’ve backed both software and physical merchandise projects through it, and have been relatively happy with pretty much every project I have ended up chipping in on. Kickstarter does a lot of things, but the biggest one to me is that it allows me to vote with my dollar on what I think is going to be an idea worth making. I rarely back very far into a given product tree, and the end result is me usually getting a cut price copy of the game at launch. While many of these games offer a double platinum early access alpha program… that is not so much what I am interested at least not any more.

Tired of Alphas

Once upon a time I wanted to be playing every single game I could get my hands on. I reveled in the fact that I had alpha and beta tested most of the MMOs out there. For a period of time this was something that was achievable because at any given moment there were a very limited number of Alpha and Beta test programs available. Somewhere along the line I noticed that playing an Alpha seriously adversely effected my chances of staying with a game for very long after release. In essence I would burn myself out playing the Alpha, so that when launch happened the game felt very old and tired to me. The pinnacle of this problem happened for me with Elder Scrolls Online. I seriously cared about the release of this game, and I took my Alpha testing duties seriously. I was told at one point that I was in the top 1% of all bug reporters in the game, and every single time we played I spent most of my time reporting and re-reporting issues I saw.

The problem here is that I had been alpha and beta testing builds of this game for a good year before the game actually launched. So while I only managed to play about three months after the launch of the title, in truth that was around 17 months of me actually playing the game. Huge chunks of the content I had literally seen hundreds of times, and remembered each of the different incarnations. The additional problem is I had trouble letting go of the past. There were some changes made in that game that I considered “for the worse” and myself and many of the other early testers rather vehemently pined for the imagined “good ole days” of early alpha. Memory is always an incomplete state, and what we remembered was this or that feature that stood out in an ocean of an otherwise broken game. The final product was so much better than the one we were requesting they return to, but we got hung up on the minutiae of this or that feature that we missed. Basically I learned that Alpha testing ultimately ruined my enjoyment of the final product… and it only took me twenty some years to wake up to this fact.

Back But Don’t Play

Ultimately I have a very nuanced stance on Kickstarter. I am more than happy to donate money towards a cause that I believe in like the creation of a brand new Wasteland experience on the PC, or any of the other games I have backed that let me wallow in the nostalgia of my youth. Generally speaking I now back just far enough into it to give myself a cut rate copy of the game at launch. Then when I get said copy and any bonus trappings… it seats neatly in my Steam account until I am ready to play it. I might boot it up periodically to check on its progress, but ultimately I am not going to start the game for real until I see that note from the developer talking about how the game has launched. The problem is this also means I am phenomenally bad at tracking the progress of games on Kickstarter. I almost always have a message that needs to be responded to about this or that game but this is what works for me. It lets me feel like I am backing things that I believe in, but also gives me the piece of mind of not actually starting a game play session until the game is “finished”.

As far as other games that are in a permanent state of development like Minecraft… once again my feelings are a bit more nuanced. Paying to play an alpha does not really bother me, if the experience and the enjoyment itself is worth paying to play said alpha. I got into Minecraft for example during its pre-beta days when you could pick up a copy for well under $10. I have gotten easily $1000 worth of enjoyment out of that game. Similarly while I don’t play them nearly as often I have gotten more than enough happiness out of both Trove and Landmark to recuperate any costs I might have put into them. Ultimately backing an unfinished game, and playing said unfinished game is not an entirely bad idea… so long as you go into it with the thought process that you are playing something that isn’t quite done yet. Early Access games are in essence paid betas, and if you can live with that… awesome… if not wait for the release of the game. I personally have found that the games I played heavily in Alpha and Beta get more enjoyable over time, and going back a year after launch I end up really enjoying myself. So that is to say that the games I ruined through Alpha testing… are not in a permanent state of ruined as evidenced by my recent travels into Guild Wars 2, Wildstar, and Star Wars the Old Republic. Ultimately you have to figure out what works for you, and the amount or risk you are willing to take. If I feel like I am going to care about a game, I try my best not to burn out before launch.

Finding Your Time

May 9, 2015 by Belghast

Writing Blocks

This morning I am trying to knock a post out quickly before “Rainmageddon” gets here. While I don’t really believe it the neighbor across the street said we are likely to get “ten inches” of rain during the course of the day. That would be absolutely insane. My wife’s theory however is that she just misheard and the news actually said “two inches”. In any case starting at noon today we are likely not going to want to be out in the world. This is awesome because it means I can binge on video games. What is not so awesome is the fact that I need to get a post out quickly rather than my normal lazy Saturday and Sunday posting schedule. So I have a video game soundtrack on to block out the world, and am in beast mode! Sadly my beast mode is more like a sleepy kitten, but in any case… I am making things happen! For those curious I am listening to the State of Decay soundtrack that is available on Google Play.

Normally Storytime Saturday is the day when I tell you some tale about myself, and I try really hard to make it one I have not already told. The problem there is that I have shared so many intimate details of my life with you all, and that I have zero recollection of what I say on any given day. Hell there are days I get to work and I will see entire sections of a post that I don’t remember writing. In the spirit of the Newbie Blogger Initiative this mornings “Storytime” is more than likely going to be a free form rambling mess as I share indiscriminant tips and tricks I have learned over the years. The key to thriving as a blog is to be predictable in your posting schedule, and in order to make this happen it means you need to set aside specific blocks of time to write. How big of a block of time depends entirely on the style of post you make. When I write a post that requires lots of research those are usually done over the course of several days, with me keeping notes in a Google drive document. My “normal” style of posting however takes anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour of me sitting down at the keyboard and physically writing it out.

Finding Your Time

When I launched this blog in 2009 I spent a lot of my lunch hours writing posts. For the most part this worked great because it was a fixed block of time when I was not really doing anything else. The problem is as work got busier, and I started actually going out for lunch… my noon writing block evaporated. There were more than a few days when I was working on a problem that I could not set down long enough to write a post, and by the time whatever had been fixed… I was usually too drained mentally to produce something worth reading. I wont say this was the reason behind some of my larger lapses but it was certainly a contributing factor. When I started on my “Grand Experiment” I knew I was going to have to figure out something else to do. I had gotten in the habit of going upstairs with my morning coffee and piddling around in a video game for thirty minutes to an hour before actually going into work. This “boot up” time greatly improved my cognitive ability by the time I got to work, so it was actually something that turned out to be pretty beneficial.

When finding your own block of time you have to evaluate your own schedule. Where is a block that you are doing something every single day, or every few days… that you could tweak a bit to turn that into a time to write your blog posts? For me I happily sacrificed my morning game time in an effort to give myself a regular place to write words and things. This however has been a double edged sword. I literally cannot start my day without writing a blog post, and the days when I have to do something differently and stage the post the night before… I feel like something is off the entire day. I have incorporated this writing phase into my morning boot up routine and when it is missing, I am just not fully functional. Additionally the problem of writing while you are not entirely awake means sometimes entire blocks of text don’t really make much sense. Thankfully the frequency of my posting makes up for some of this. When you are posting every single day, your readers cut you a lot more slack for having an “off day”.

Keep a Contract

The other nice fringe benefit of morning writing is that you feel like you have accomplished some thing. No matter how south the rest of the day turns, you will have at least had a tiny victory that morning. For years my wife has done something that I just did not understand until I looked at my own blogging. When we clean the house we usually divide and conquer, meaning I take certain rooms and she takes certain rooms. One of the rooms she always wants to do is the Bathroom and I have never understood why she tackles it first thing. She has always said it made her feel like she had accomplished something, and I guess in a way gets those good vibe endorphins flowing making the rooms that are more painful a little easier to do. I can definitely see this whole process working because I absolutely see these same kind of benefits with my own blog posts. No matter how frustrating the rest of the day is… I at least accomplished writing another post and I continued the chain of daily postings by one more day.

Whatever your block or your schedule I think the absolute most important thing is to treat it like a contract. It becomes extremely easy to give yourself an excuse for not writing one day, that turns into not writing for an entire month. Before I ventured down the path of daily writing there were so many times when I told myself “I just am not feeling it” and let myself off the hook without writing a post. Then as months went by of “not feeling it” it became harder to actually start the process again. In order to keep a schedule you need a certain amount of rigor in your life, and a willingness to sacrifice other things to make sure the ball keeps moving forward. I know this might sound like an odd statement, especially for something that we all consider a hobby. The problem is you can’t really treat it like a hobby and achieve the predictable regularity that your readers will want. In many was blogging is a second job, admittedly one you do out of love… but there still needs to be some constraints on your time. At this point I have blogged every single day for over two years… so I have this pressure built up in NOT missing a single day. I have motivation to keep going, and keep writing… and I think it is this motivation that you have to find for yourself.