First up this morning I am going to talk a bit about Bungie account linking and the Battle.net to Steam transfer process. Largely I am going through the motions here just in case someone out there has not been following the news related to Destiny 2 for some time. Bungie is divorcing Activision and part of the terms of the divorce is that they will be moving the PC version of Destiny 2 away from Activision Blizzard owned Battle.net. The new partner for account information will be Steam, a thing we all pretty much already have. However the data from Battle.net needs to be linked up and copied to your Steam account.
As a result yesterday they opened up the process for doing this. I tweeted out the link yesterday but you need to go to Bungie.net and use the PC Move tool. Effectively this will walk you through the process of logging into a Battle.net account, verifying your characters and such that are owned by that account, logging in a Steam account, and finally verifying that everything is appearing on the Steam entitlement screen. It took me a few minutes and now Steam shows up in the list of accounts that I have linked. The truth is I am largely okay with this move because the integration with Battle.net never worked quite as smoothly as I would have liked it to.
Next up in the “things I think are cool” department. With Gamescom comes a bunch of new trailers, and this time we have one for Shadowkeep showing off the finisher moves. This is something new going into Destiny 2 and seem to be similar to the finishing moves in Doom 2016. Essentially when an enemy gets low enough you can perform a special melee attack with its own unique animation and punch/kick/whatever the monster to death. The bad bit is that the cosmetic versions of these will be Eververse exclusive, but the mods you can associate with them that do things like spawn heavy ammo will be gained through gameplay.
Next up we got a trailer for the first post-Shadowkeep Season, this time seemingly focused on the Vex and the Black Garden. I still think the Vex are one of the cooler enemies we fight, and I’ve always thought it cool that the radiolarian fluid that you see come out of them when you kill one is a sentient hive being of a sort. There are some rumors floating around as to why we are going back to the Black Garden, but in truth I don’t really care. I am just happy to see Bungie slowly clawing back locations that only appeared in Destiny 1 and putting them in Destiny 2. Next step… I want to see them simply recreate the Destiny 1 experience inside of Destiny 2 and rebrand the whole thing to simply being “Destiny”.
The other day I posted what was largely a throwaway tweet while watching part of the Gamescom Xbox show. It featured some of the most hyperbolic pitch folks I have ever seen, that were fake levels of excitement about every little thing that was being announced. That level of forced hype really is a turn off, which is sad because once I was able to get past that there were a bunch of cool things that they talked about. So I find myself wondering… how did I get into this state where I almost feel allergic to hype? E3 2019 was largely a disappointment, and what I have seen from Gamescom could be thrown in a similar category.
Is it just that I am gunshy from being burned so many times? I mean I poured my heart in soul into Anthem and largely found a really great game… but one that stopped being great after you burned through the initial story-line. That said I think the Anthem reveal at E3 several years back was the last time I was fully on board with a staged demo selling me on the notion of what the game might be like. It might just be that I have reached a point where I am skeptical about anything that is being announced, because while I lead this off with talk about Destiny 2 and the fact that it is in a pretty great place… it has taken them three years of ups and downs to get to that place.
I think a whole other side of this is just the sheer concern of not knowing where I will find the time to play even half of the things that I am vaguely interested in. I already feel like I have a crushing back log pushing down on me of games that I really feel like I should be playing for various reasons. Then just looking ahead I have no clue how I am going to navigate all of the release dates. I just assembled this quick list which is in no way complete… but represents some of the bullet points on my radar for the rest of 2019.
- World of Warcraft Classic – August 27th
- Monster Hunter World Iceborne – September 6th
- Borderlands 3 – September 13th
- Destiny 2 Shadowkeep / Season of the Undying – October 1st
- The Outer Worlds – October 25th
- Death Stranding – November 8th
- Jedi Fallen Order – November 15th
- Pokemon Sword and Shield November 15th
- Doom Eternal – November 22nd
There is a part of me that wonders if my challenge getting hyped about things coming down the pipe is a defense mechanism seeing as I know that I don’t have time to play all of the things I already want to play, and then for the rest of the year at a minimum of every other week something new is being released that I also really want to play. I have no clue how I am going to juggle all of this, and as a result I am just wondering if my brain is throwing up blinders and screaming at me that enough is enough.
The level of excitement that I feel however seems to be hampered as well. Like yesterday I wrote about my love of Black Isle/Obsidian and everything I have seen about The Other Worlds seems like a return to the best of what I love from them… Fallout New Vegas. However I am finding it really challenging to muster more than a mild sense of excitement about it. My brain is stuck in a mode where I am trying to figure out how I will juggle my schedule to find the time to really devote a weekend or two to exploring it.
Maybe I am just broken. Whatever the case though I really don’t want my ramblings to harsh the excitement someone else is feeling about it. My twitter comment really was meant as a sort of throwaway reaction, but maybe I need to watch those more closely. I don’t want to come off as a bitter old man, but maybe on some level that is what I am? It sucks. I want to feel child like joy when I watch a games presentation again. I miss having E3 or BlizzCon or any other major show to feel like Christmas morning.
I definitely don’t try to avoid buying into the hype as a defense mechanism. I bought into the Oblivion hype back in the days and to say that the final product disappointed me would be a understatement. Since then I have tried to be very, very careful about hype. Although I still fall into it from time to time.
Now I am wondering if the backlog might also be a reason for me to ignore the hype even more too. I mean, there is a lot of games that if I was vaguely interested in I’d buy immediately. But there are so many games nowadays and at least on PC it is so much more convenient to put it on a Wishlist and buy it a later date that I don’t feel the need to buy them immediately as they are released too.
That is also make it easier to ignore the hype: just put it on the Wishlist if it is something I actually care about, wait for reviews or just for a moment where I have an itch that game can scratch.
I have played games for so long, played Atari Adventure for days, seen so many previews for games that look nothing like what you get that I no longer look at presentations or cut scenes to influence me. Instead I look at the videos that Blizzard puts out and think to myself, look at how much has changed from 8bit pixels on a screen to where we are now in the last 40 years, will gaming advance to the level where the highest level of detailed cinematic is normal settings for our games.
My hat off to you for playing all you do. I barely have time to play WoW retail, or more the desire for current, and next week will delve into Classic. I don’t know which will garner more of my time, but I hope one does more than the other.
I am absolutely convinced that we become a little more jaded about the hype cycle of games as a defense mechanism. To protect ourselves against repeating the pain or at least severe disappointment that comes from finding something we believed in isn’t what we wanted it to be after all.
And the worst thing is — so often we do it to ourselves. Sure there is a hypeman in the background selling the dream in a lot of cases, but in others we latch on and run for the hills with it.
I try not to be actively negative about everything. That isn’t a fun position to take for anyone involved. But I would say I’m typically more ‘wary’. Anthem definitely shot through the cracks of my armor though. Not from the initial E3 reveals, but certainly in the last few months leading up to launch.
I still stand by the review I wrote about it, but as time goes by, I grow increasingly doubtful the vision we wanted for it as a long term experience is going to come to fruition.
Ah well. Things like Anthem will occasionally penetrate the barrier. And I think that’s OK. At least it lets us know that somewhere under the colder exterior, there is still a part willing to believe.
Speaking of which, and Gamescom: Kerbal Space Program 2. … 😮
The thing with Anthem, IMO, is that it is hard to turn a game around when “Influencers” are working overtime to put it in a coffin. Like if all the big YouTubers weren’t telling everyone who would listen how much Anthem sucked, maybe the team wouldn’t have been stripped of people and they might have had the manpower to fix the loot/endgame. Because the basic mechanics were great. I had a wonderful time playing through the storyline.
Thank goodness Sony was willing to stand behind Hello Games and No Man’s Sky…
With Anthem unfortunately it wasn’t just influencers. I gave up when I lost faith that they had a clue what was actually wrong with the game. I hit a hard wall and the grind required to push through that wall felt horrible. The problem is even if I could have pushed through and gotten Full Legendary gear, there was nothing for me to spend time doing. I’ve contemplated going back and trying to the Cataclysm event, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that it is a limited time event. Games need things that permanently increase the number of things for players to do in their games, not a time limited chase.
I’m not saying everyone should’ve liked it or shouldn’t have criticisms. It’s more a scale thing. There were a bunch of YouTubers who basically built their channel on just slagging on Anthem, day after day, week after week. I’d open the “Recommended” Gaming tab in YouTube and it would be row after row of why Anthem sucks videos and few of them had any original content, they were just parroting each other.
Definitely address issues but at some point it just becomes beating a dead horse for clicks. If that makes any sense.