I’ve been on a narrative game kick of late, starting and finishing Alan Wake II, and then wrapping up the back half of Jedi Survivor. Essentially I know that as of December 8th, I will be once again enthralled with Path of Exile and the new league that is about to start. More importantly, this is the league we are planning on doing a private guild-only type of league which will mean we will all be leaning on each other heavily to get the things we need to complete builds without access to the larger trade league. Thursday is the big reveal of the rest of the information surrounding the league, and in the time between now and the start I am trying to catch up on narrative gaming that I have been ignoring for the sake of more Path of Exile.
I had been gone so long from Baldur’s Gate 3 that I decided to just reroll. I had never made it out of Act 1 and I was not really feeling my Duergar Barbarian so it did not seem like a massive loss. This time around I rolled a more traditional “Belghast” appearance character which means Human Male, Black Hair, Some sort of Ponytail or longer haircut, and a trimmed beard. This is a character template I have returned to time and time again over the years and feels like the most cogent realization of me I sort of wish I was. Also in Dungeons and Dragons terms I always play Rangers and Clerics… so I opted to go for a Ranger and down the dual-wielding path that I did so many times in Neverwinter Nights. Of course, I have a bear friend… and mostly Ranger was to have easier access to talking to animals. So far I like how things are going a bit better and I have corrected some early mistakes that I made.
Other than Baldur’s Gate 3, I started playing some more Guild Wars 2 and actually started the Secrets of the Obscure expansion proper. I gotta say the first map is really good and in spite of requiring flight… it seems like it would give folks a Skyscale almost immediately. I’ve just randomly happened across the meta event three times and enjoyed it quite a bit. It seems to be a happy medium between something forgettable like the Svanir Shaman and something way too difficult and cumbersome like Dragon’s End. It doesn’t really feel as rewarding as one of the big metas but also still produces quite a bit of stuff so that seems fine as well. It grants access to a loot room at the very end which is like a cut-rate version of Auric Basin which again… makes sense given that Auric Basin is probably way too rewarding.
Just the act of bopping around the landscape and chasing Rifts to close seems quite enjoyable as well. I decided to go ahead and start the content on my Ranger, in spite of never quite finishing up the Path of Fire content. It seemed very much like this was disconnected from the chronology of the previous expansions, so I was happy to see that was mostly the case here. There are characters that maybe had more dialog since I had encountered them before, but other than being “The Commander” and being known for ending the Dragon Cycle… there really is not much feedover. It also seems to assume that I finished End of Dragons because it talks about events as they have happened for someone who has finished that content. This might make the experience a bit disconcerting and spoilery if you had never completed any of that content on any other character.
Lastly, I have continued to slowly chip away at leveling classes in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve fallen into a very casual rhythm of popping in long enough to do a set of beast tribe quests, daily cactpot, and a daily frontline… which combined usually ends up adding up to a full level. At this point, I have leveled Monk and Samurai doing this and am sitting at level 88 on my Dragoon and should in theory get 89 today and 90 tomorrow. When I was leveling classes prior to Endwalker, I was super focused and spent a lot of time maximizing my experience gain… and it wound up just burning me out. Instead, now I am doing three easy things every day that I find enjoyable, but also seem to be making serious progress at working through my backlog of classes. In theory, the goal behind all of this is to finally have a great purge of gear before the launch of Dawntrail.
I know several of these things will probably fall by the wayside on the 8th when the Affliction League launches in Path of Exile, but for the moment I am having quite a bit of fun picking away at the edges of things.
One of the problems with finishing up a truly phenomenal game… is that it is occasionally hard to move past it. I had decided that I would be in a bit of a narrative phase given that I am mostly done with the Trials of the Ancestor league in Path of Exile and that I have a few weeks until the launch of the next league on December 8th. I have a list of games I wanted to play this year… but never quite got around to it. Top of the list was Alan Wake II of course, and I have now finished it… but last night I had some trouble easing into the next adventure.
Another game this year that I was deeply looking forward to was Jedi Survivor. However much like Fallen Order… I floundered a bit when I first started playing it. I decided that I would go after this as my next game to finish, and I went back and forth about whether or not it was a good idea to start from scratch. I only made it a few planets into the game and I think it would have been easy enough to retrace my steps, but instead, I decided to essentially wing it and just keep pushing forward. Thankfully I had never actually uninstalled the game and didn’t need to bother with trying to track down my save games.
I apparently had left off on a phase where I was forced to do a lot of platforming and careful gliding between platforms over a giant pit of magma. Luckily my muscle memory came back pretty quickly and the puzzle I was being asked to solve involved something brand new to me so I could learn on the go. The first thing I did was rebind a number of keys because hitting 2 and 3 on the Hotbar was a bit awkward while also having to navigate myself with WASD. I moved them down to 7 and 8 which are way more comfortable for me to hit on the keypad on the side of my g600 MMO mouse. There are probably a few other things that I want to shift around a bit. I know that this is a game designed for a controller but I fought through playing it with a mouse and keyboard for the first game and I will struggle forth again because the actual combat feels way more comfortable for me with a mouse.
I did not make it terribly far last night, but I did complete the series of puzzles that involved the gaping chasms… collected some data and am now about to face off against some Imperials as I attempt to buy folks time to evacuate a safe house. I did manage to pick up some gun parts and crafted something a bit more to my taste as far as blasters go. That is probably my favorite part about these games is collecting bits and bobs and crafting my own lightsaber and now blaster. I am hoping as I go forward with the game I will begin to feel it. At the moment I am nowhere near as connected to this particular story as I was the first one.
I am sure I will get into the swing of things as I go… but honestly, I feel like this game might be too open-ended. I know that is ironic considering how much I have praised other games for having a big explorable world… but I am not sure it really serves the story here. The set pieces are wonderful, but I gotta say I enjoyed the opening scenes on Coruscant far more than I have these wide-open planets. I think Fallen Order benefited by having a fairly linear story that was being told. Sure there were hidden places to find along the golden path… but there was still a very clear golden path to follow. It feels a bit like a Ubisoft collect all the things game… which I can’t say is necessarily a good thing. I’m hoping once I get engaged in the plot thread I will ignore this and just push forward.
The other big game that I am hoping to make a dent in during this break is Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty. If I manage to wrap these two up I will be pretty happy, but if I do and have room left over… I am probably going to play some more Zelda or maybe actually finally try and get into Final Fantasy XVI. The tail end of the year tends to be when I have the mental power to focus on story-driven adventures.
Yesterday was the launch of a brand new banner in Honkai Star Rail, and as a result, I had to return and test my luck. I’ve not been playing this game of late, largely because I have been hyper-focused on Path of Exile. That said I had quite a amount of currency saved up given that I completely skipped the Not-Dan-Heng banner and managed to snag Kafka relatively quickly. Probably the most important thing about this banner, in particular, is it gives access to a brand new 4-star healer, making it hopefully much easier to obtain than the other options. I remember desperately pulling against the Luocha banner in the hopes of obtaining him because I needed a second healer.
I snagged Lynx the new healer almost immediately and then managed to get two additional copies so that I now have her with some eidolons unlocked. The challenge with new characters is that you essentially have to level them up from scratch, and I was already strapped for resources. I will have to play with her a bit to see if I like her better than Natasha because for the moment Luocha is just so powerful that I would find him hard to replace.
Pretty quickly I saw the gold glow from the train car and hoped that meant I would be picking up the new character Fu Xuan. However, it seems like I had wasted my pitty on Bailu. There was a time when I really wanted this character, but largely because I was stuck needing a second healer. Now I have four healers… which greatly dilutes the importance of Bailu. I guess it is still cool anytime you can pick up a 5 star though.
Another character that I really need to level is Pela. I kinda developed a kinship with this character during the Museum event, and in truth, she is really freaking strong. Given that she is easy to pull on this banner, I managed to pick up enough additional copies of her to unlock all of her eidolons. So at some point, I really need to get around to focusing on leveling and equipping her.
I had made six pulls on the banner depleted almost all of my saved-up currency, and essentially expected not to get the new 5 Star off this banner. Then I remembered that I have the monthly pass thing, and never converted the other currency it gives you into pull currency. So shifting those 300 whatsits into 300 whosits gave me the 1600 needed for a seventh round. It was then that I lucked into a mega pull picking up another copy of Pela, Hook, and the chase character Fu Xuan.
So I ultimately depleted any reserves that I had but I guess it was well worth it to pick up a 6 Eidolon DPS, 2 new healers, and the chase character. I had what I would consider to be an extreme amount of luck to walk away with two 5-star characters in such a short period of time. Now I return to banking my currency until the next banner that I care about rolls around. I need to get back into the swing of playing each day at least a little bit. I think the challenge that I find myself in, is I have so much story content that I now need to complete that logging in just feels overwhelming.
I kind of think of this as the “bags full” problem. There are many MMOs that I can’t bring myself to return to because my bags are full of crap that I no longer recognize, and I just don’t have the spoons to sort through it. In Honkai Star Rail and Final Fantasy XIV… I have an overwhelming amount of content to do in order to get caught up again… so that when I see that I just log right back out. I wish I had a mental trick to avoid this because it ultimately spells a death spiral for many games. This is most definitely a “me” problem not necessarily something wrong with any of the games that trigger it. Anyways… I hope you have been having a great week. Mine has been inordinately stressful but it seems like things are beginning to calm down.
Good morning folks! I am technically on vacation today… and technically on vacation tomorrow as well but I figured I might as well spend a bit and knock out a blog post. Since my last post about Blaugust, Starfield has come out with a game that brought with it both unrealistic hype and toxic negativity depending upon where your biases against Bethesda Games landed. I am a Bethesda enjoyer, so I knew without a doubt that I would check this game out. I tried my best to go into this experience with as neutral of expectations as possible. I did not expect this game to be the second coming of Skyrim, nor did I expect it to be vaporware as some corners of the internet seemed to. What I expected more or less was Fallout in Space and that is essentially what they have delivered.
Starfield above all else is a Bethesda game, and that comes with certain parameters. You will have your accompaniment of weird dead-eyed NPCs and bizarre glitches but also a lot of freedom in how you go about approaching the game. It was announced before this game came out that it was going to be one of the most bug-free Bethesda games, and quite honestly… I believe that. However, I have still seen my share of weird bugs that are often fixed by either resting or zoning out of an area and back into it. Yesterday I had a quest NPC randomly float up into the ceiling while I was trying to turn in… and essentially zoning in and out resolved the problem allowing me to continue with my gameplay session. So far I have only had one crash to desktop, which is quite honestly pretty good for a Bethesda game.
What you gain for your slight moments of “Bethesda Jank”, are some really gorgeous examples of level design. On the podcast this weekend we referred to this as “NASApunk” and it seems to be the best description. Everything is big, chunky, analog, and inspired by the space age. This is how I dreamed space would look like as a kid, and I am thrilled to be roaming around the world in my space suit. The game even gives us some really cool moments where we are learning how to fight in Zero-G, with my ballistic weapon kick causing me to go flying backward. The thing is… Starfield has a lot of really cool ideas… some of which are not exactly implemented perfectly, but there are enough hooks there to allow modders to come in later and perfect them.
For example, the Character creation system is beautiful in its simplicity and has the model, the rigging, and gender choices being handled by a very simple pronoun selector… rather than the awkward genitalia simulation systems in some other games of late. Does it go far enough? Probably not for everyone, but there is enough separation there that I would imagine someone is going to be able to come in after the fact and create body and rigging packs similar to how they have in something like Second Life, allowing folks to exist in space in exactly the body and gender identity that they want to have. I wasn’t super happy with the beard options, but I know given time someone will release a mod pack that will resolve this for me. I think a lot of the way I approach a Bethesda game is knowing that eventually, I am going to have fifty-some mods installed at some point to completely tailor the game experience to my tastes.
Let’s talk about some of the places where the game fails. Space combat I believe is probably one of these areas, mainly because for someone who does not want anything to do with simulated space flight… this game is a bit too fiddly for my tastes. However, it is way too simplistic and hamfisted to work for a Star Citizen enjoyer like my friend Tam. So by shooting for this awkward middleground… it is essentially disappointing both ends of the spectrum. Most of my interaction with spaceflight is that I don’t interact… I try my best to always rely on fast travel options for which there are many. You can jump from system to system without having to spend a lot of time actually piloting your ship. There are a few missions however where you will be forced to fumble through space combat. For example, in the above screenshot, I was trying to sneak up and repair a satellite without drawing the attention of some baddies. I did it… but it felt like one of the most cumbersome things I had done in recent memory and have no real interest in doing this again.
Another place where the game fails miserably… is with the talent system. Personally I prefer the old school days of just having a list of talents as compared to this whole talent tree system with pretty pictograms representing each talent. In past Bethesda games, you could TRY and do things… albeit badly without having any talent points assigned to a skill. In Starfield you are not even given the option to try something. This leads to some weird happenings like… it took me 10 hours before I realized there was a talent tree that dictated whether or not I could use a boost pack aka this game’s version of a jet pack. Similarly in my first pass through the talents I completely missed that Security was what this game called “Lockpicking” because I assumed this would be in the social tree not in the tech tree and just assumed I had not uncovered it yet. The game forces you to spend a certain number of points in the first tier of abilities before it allows you to proceed to the second, third, or fourth tiers so I just assumed it was something I had not earned access to yet.
Had I realized this… I might not have gone all in on Ballistics like I have. I do sort of love the octopus with “many guns” icon though. Essentially the skills feel kludgy and I am hoping someone will come in after the fact and mod these to work a bit better. I think that outlines my feelings in general… that Starfield in many ways feels like a good first draft of a game and that I know modders will come along and perfect each of the individual niches. Like for example I hate carrying weight as a concept in video games. I want to be able to loot everything and carry it around forever. Inventory maintenance is never an interesting gameplay loop for me personally. I know that someone out there will release a simple mod that I can install to just remove this gameplay loop entirely so I don’t have to care about it. For the moment I have done this myself with console commands, and it was one of the first things I did upon playing the game. The Bethesda experience for me personally is tailoring the game to fit me, rather than trying to play it the way they intended.
As a result, I view this game as a work in progress, and when I encounter something that annoys me… my first reaction is not to throw up my arms in frustration… it is to go search NexusMods to see if there is a way to mod that frustration out of existence. It is because of this mindset though that I have a really hard time reviewing a Bethesda game. I’ve been playing these for so long at this point, and I know that given enough desire… You can pretty much make the game do anything you want it to do. You have to understand that when I first played Skyrim, I had no clue that you could choose Thief, Warrior, or Mage statues to direct your gameplay… because the second I got out of that first town I was leaving the main questline behind. That said… I am spending a lot more time in this game following the main quest because it is way more cumbersome to travel off the grid.
One of the challenges for me personally is that with Starfield, it is much harder to just wander off into the distance looking for something interesting. Most planets are fairly empty in the grand scheme of things. There are far fewer POIs and way more barren fields of assorted minerals and resources. When you land on a planet, you are dropped into a region surrounding some fixed points of interest, and a bit of procedurally generated area around them. In Skyrim, almost everything in the game existed for a reason… and going there ahead of time allowed you to essentially brute force your way through a side quest that would take you there eventually. In Starfield… there are a lot of areas that only serve as a way to refill your ammunition and med packs… and places for you to farm randomly generated space mercenaries, pirates, and cultists. Knowing that a lot of the world is pointless… gives me less desire to explore it.
That is not to say that you will not have a bazillion conversations that you overhear while roaming around the world and notes that you pick up that will lead you to “pointful” areas. The Starfield experience though sorta waters down the effectiveness of my chosen way of playing a Bethesda game. So as a result I am mostly just following the golden path, or have for the first thirteen hours of playing it. I am not necessarily mainlining this game as my only entertainment, as I am still playing quite a bit of Path of Exile. I am however enjoying the time I am spending with it, and I don’t want me pointing out its flaws to make it come across like I am not enjoying it greatly. In fact, Starfield is honestly the sort of game that I kinda of wish Destiny would have been. If I could take the world of Starfield, and transplant the Destiny-style gunplay… then I think I would be in heaven. The gunplay is so much better than any other Bethesda title out there, but it is still eons behind anything I would call “good” gunplay.
At this point I am really bought into the story, even though it is sort of riddled with tropes we have all experienced before in other games. I like the world quite a bit and I like experiencing it… albeit with a bit more direction than I am used to in a Bethesda title. Is this game-of-the-year material? Honestly, I am not sure. There are so many great narrative experiences this year, and this is more of a sandbox experience where you need to bring with it your own expectations that shape it. Do I regret buying Starfield? Hell no. I am having a blast honestly, but I still feel like it is important to talk about the flaws of that experience. More or less Stafield is a higher fidelity and much larger version of The Outer Worlds, without that game’s particular sense of humor. It will be interesting how we feel about it in ten years, and if we honor this new franchise in all the same ways that we do Fallout or Skyrim. So far… it doesn’t have nearly as much personality as either of those games does but I am only 13 hours in instead of 1300 hours over multiple playthroughs.
It is also somewhat unfair to expect a new IP to have near the punching weight as Fallout, a game that I have been playing for a quarter of a century at this point. I’ve enjoyed this enough though to give it time to grow and come into its own. I am hoping with time something like Galacticat will make me even halfway as happy as Vault Boy does. For now, I am enjoying the journey, and I definitely think Starfield is worth your time especially if you were already a big fan of these sorts of games. Admittedly my perspective is exclusive to PC gameplay where you can mod anything until your heart is content. I have no clue what a Bethesda game experience feels like on a console because I never play Bethesda games in their vanilla launch state without at least a bit of tweaking. I figure this is probably going to feel similar to all other Bethesda games you have ever played. If you go into the game expecting that sort of gameplay experience… then you are probably going to be very happy with it.
