Blog Features

Regularly Playing: September 2020 Edition

by

Hey Folks! There is a thing that I occasionally do on my blog where I run down what I have been playing lately. There are games that I spend time in that don’t necessarily make it to the level of writing about. Regularly Playing has always served as a time for me to update the good ole sidebar of the blog and talk about the things that I am spending time exploring. It is also a time for me to push aside the games that for whatever reason I am just not that into right now. You have a lot of games that make their way back into the rotation, so when I say goodbye it is very rarely forever.

In theory this is a thing that I intend to do every month… but we are living in this time where it still feels like it SHOULD by all rights be March. I think this is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” because it feels like we are all still very much on pause waiting for things to improve. I expect a significant amount of shake up given that it has been a little over two months since my last update.

To Those Remaining

Diablo III – PC and Switch

Oh Diablo, my sweet Diablo… I can’t ever seem to quit you. This game probably spends the most time on this list, especially now that it exists in switch form. While I am finished with the current PC season, I do still fairly regularly pop it open from bed on the switch and chip away at the achievements there. What can I say that I have not already said a dozen times. I just hope I like Diablo IV even half as much as I love Diablo III.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

Oh precious baby, you are hanging by a thread. I’ve been back a bit of late for the Yo-Kai watch event, but even that has mostly just been something to do while watching something on television. I know there is a whole new story arc that I need to play through since the 5.3 patch has landed finally. I will do that at some point but I am just not overly excited about Final Fantasy XIV right now. I wish I was because it truly is a wonderful game, but I am not sure what changed in me that struggles to latch onto the MMORPG gameplay experience for very long. I find myself being a strict soloist in the MMO space right now, and as a result I never quite fully buy into the good aspects of the culture and the gameplay offerings. I wish I could get over my fear of doing content with other human beings that I seem to have developed.

World of Warcraft – Retail and Beta – PC

I am not what you would call actively playing this game, but every so often I decide to poke my head in and work on leveling some of my alts. During this lull in the expansion I have leveled one of everything horde side by the Shaman, Priest and Rogue. I’ve been most recently working on the Shaman who is in Pandaria and I believe a few levels away from 100? This is often times the character that I play while we are podcasting, or if I am watching some show because World of Warcraft requires a bare minimum of interactivity to play it on the level I am playing it. I still get a stupid amount of enjoyment from its simple mechanics and my ability to just turn my brain off and rely entirely upon muscle memory.

To The New and Returning

Avengers – PC

I super did not expect to be playing this game right now. I had a lot of issues early on with it, but it turns out that I was more or less bit in the butt by my own shenanigans. There are still some minor issues of mouse and camera not exactly working in the way that I would prefer but it is extremely playable and the story is really solid. In fact I think at this point I am mostly playing because the story is extremely enjoyable. The game hits a deep uncanny valley at times because I think they are trying to shoot halfway between the more traditional comic appearance of the characters and that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve gotten used to it however and once I did the story being told has become pure joy.

Ghosts of Tsushima – PS4

I have been on a bit of a single player narrative game kick of late, and I have been playing a significant amount of Ghosts of Tsushima. I’ve not made it past the first part of the game, because I keep roaming around and killing baddies. I am more or less following the Samurai path where I present a challenge and then proceed to whittle down the rest of the masses after taking out their strongest. I love this game a lot, and the only thing that would have made it better is if I were playing on the PC with a Mouse and Keyboard. I’ve been a bit distracted the last week or so, but I am hoping over the extended weekend that I can return to this and keep moving forward.

Hades – PC

I am not entirely certain that this game has ever made the list, but I have had it in my arsenal for awhile now. I have a deep love for the types of games that Supergiant creates. Even when I don’t mechanically enjoy the game like was the case with Pyre, I really appreciate the story that is being told. Hades is effectively a blend of Diablo and a Rogue Lite game and involves escaping from the underworld, and powering yourself along the way to make that possible. It is a game or repetition because you are absolutely going to die over and over and over in your journey, each time starting back at the start and each time carrying some progress along with you. This has been in early access but we are starting to near an official launch, so I have been playing it again in anticipation. Really solid game.

New World – PC

I’ve not participated in two test events of New World and I am super happy to finally be able to start talking about it. The last long preview event that is wrapping up I believe today had no NDA and as a result I have been able to openly discuss it on the blog. As it stands I am so ready for this game to launch and to start being able to play it in earnest. I am hoping the next event is an Open Beta so that folks who did not pre-order can give it a shot and see if it works for them. This is definitely the type of game that I am going to want to find an active company to play in, and that does not mean that I am sold on the notion of leading one. I’m good at recruiting people, but I don’t seem to be good at keeping people engaged… myself included. So more than likely I will be looking for a company to join that would be open to any friends that I have who are also interested.

Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch

This is going to be a bit of a generic heading because I have been poking around in a lot of “retro games”. The thing is… I find it weird calling these game retro, because they are from my childhood. It is moments like this that I remember just how damned old I am at this point. Whatever you want to call them I have been back on a kick of trying to get my closet full of older systems and cartridges up and running on modern display technology. I’ve also purchased a Retro Freak console, which allows me to do a bunch of nifty things including dump rom and save games from cartridges and apply translation patches on the fly. The next project is to try and get my Neo Geo CD system up and running again and maybe apply the mod that replaces the very slow CD Rom with an SD Card interface.

To Those Departing

Destiny 2 – PC

I am not sure where we went wrong boo, I’m just not playing you. I have no clue what is up but for whatever reason I just haven’t been interested in playing Destiny 2 in this current season. I am not sure if it is the impending gear sunset or the fact that they are “vaulting” content to remove it from the game, but whatever the case I am just turned off right now. I think games should get larger over time not shrink constantly, and I hate the FOMO aspect of seasonal play. The truth however is just that I have not been interested in playing a shooter lately, and this last few months has been largely marked by me playing more single player and narrative driven content. I am sure I will be back when the expansion launches in November and have a grand ole time.

Guild Wars 2 – PC

You know that mission that AggroChat folks have been on about playing Guild Wars 2 and getting others to play it as well? For whatever reason it never sunk its hooks properly into me. I still don’t fully understand why this game that on paper should be something I am deeply into… never quite seems to work for me. There is just something about the gameplay loop that I don’t find as enjoyable as I should. The story content also never really hooked me, so while I keep trying to revisit this game… it never really does it for me. I am sure I will be back at some point because I am a glutton for punishment with a very short memory.

Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC

I can’t fully explain what happened here and why I stopped playing this game, but it happened. I am not even sure what distracted me. I just know that I have not logged in for a long while other than to convert to the Steam client. I am sure I will return because I was having quite a bit of fun with it. I also know that I was only a few levels away from hitting the cap at the time, and that there is a raised cap now that we have entered Chapter 4. I think I mostly got distracted by a string of single player experiences like Death Stranding.

Torchlight III – PC

I really do want to like this game, but I have not been all that into of it late. I think the core problem I have with the third iteration is that there just isn’t really a class that I enjoy. In Torchlight there was the Destroyer that I played a ton of, and in Torchlight II it was the Engineer. Both were big and bashy melee characters and right now in the third game there are two characters that CAN be played that way… but they both sorta feel fiddly. So I have been splitting my time between the Forge and the Railmaster…. and to be truthful neither of them feel the way that I want them to feel. I know Torchlight is a game that tries to cast aside the traditional Mage, Rogue, Warrior, and Cleric blend of classes… but I mostly just wish they had proper representation of those archetypes. My preference is to play something akin to the Diablo Barbarian or Crusader and they just don’t really have that represented.

Ships Passing in the Night

Death Stranding – PC

Death Stranding was a phenomenal experience. I legit get emotional just thinking about it. This is the game that I needed to play at the time in which I played it. It has become this extremely relevant allegory for the time that we are living in. I am not sure this is a game that everyone would enjoy, because the whole courier aspect of it that I found enjoyable could be pure tedium for someone else. The story being told though is really good and if nothing else you should probably watch a play through of it at some point.

Horizon Zero Dawn -PC

I had been anxiously awaiting the release of Horizon Zero Dawn for the PC, and when it came out I burned through it like wildfire. I think I put in a solid 50 hours in a very short period of time and cracking this open and revisiting it all was truly magical. I love Aloy and the world of Horizon, and I am anxiously awaiting the sequel. This is pretty much the reason why I will be buying a PlayStation 5 as soon as the pre-orders open. If you have never played Horizon Zero Dawn, you owe it to yourself to experience the game and the bow combat just works so much better with a Mouse and Keyboard.

Summary

I guess this is what happens when I wait almost three months between updates, there is a lot of change. I’ve bounced a few things off the list that I am almost certain I will revisit. Hell to be truthful what usually happens is just writing about them ends up making me want to log back in again. I know we have the launch of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 that will be eating some of my time, and I would really like to restart Jedi Fallen Order but this time play it with Mouse and Keyboard. Additionally I really want to play through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which has been on my list for awhile. In between those I will be wrapping up Avengers main story and seeing if I like the group content or not, and probably poking my head into New World each time a new test event opens. All the while the backlog continues to grow, but I have gotten fairly used to knowing I will never quite conquer it.

Goodbye Promptapalooza

by

Well Folks, for better or worse we have finished the running of another Blaugust. This year things were mixed up significantly given that we technically ran the traditional Blaugust event back in April as “Blapril”. Instead of repeating things I made an attempt to create something different, and I think the jury is still out on how well it worked. The idea was simple in my mind, but the closer we got to actually starting it I realized just how complicated it actually was. I think the original intent was that we would be providing prompts for the community to write about, but instead it largely just turned into a thing were someone wrote about a prompt each day and we attempted to shine the light on that effort.

The dates were staggered so that for example on 8/30 I would technically be giving the prompt for 8/31. However that just confused everyone involved, and instead we shifted to something that carried off without a hitch. I am super proud of everyone who offered their support in this madness, and how reasonably well it worked. In the spirit of this adventure I figure it is a good time to do a final rundown of the prompts that were shared.

That is of course just a fraction of the posts that were created during this event, and you can see a large number of them using the Blaugust2020 Hashtag. The biggest complaint that I saw from anyone was that the prompts didn’t fit them that well. The challenge there however was that I tried to create 31 prompts that were fairly generic. Blaugust being what it is, it is a community that spans anyone one game… or even gaming in general and the hope was to try and make it as malleable as possible. The ultimate hope was that the writers would take that generic seed of a prompt and turn it into something that fit them personally. There were an awful lot that managed to do that which makes me exceptionally proud, and when I look at the list above it seems like a success to me.

Prompt 31

Horizon Zero Dawn – PC

So, I would say the event went off without a hitch minus one slight problem. Given that the prompts were offset by a day… I was originally supposed to be making this post on the 30th and not the 31st. That felt odd however and I made the executive decision to just sorta bump this one post a bit so it lines up better with the end of August. The prompts were legitimately assigned at random and the final prompt that landed on me is as follows.

What is your favorite thing to do in order to relax?

Blaugust 2020 – Prompt 31

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you are probably going to realize that my answer is going to be gaming. There are a myriad of reasons why people play games. There are folks who really have a competitive spirit and love to play games for the challenge. There are folks who really enjoy the social aspect of gaming and do so as a way of hanging out with their friends. For me… when I am playing games at the purest I am playing them as an escape from the woes of the day to day grind. I love coming home and effectively melding into a game, shutting my brain off and just relying on pure muscle memory as I pilot the character like an extension of myself.

The Many Faces of Bel in various games

I think this is in part why Open World games and Massively Multiplayer Online Games have always been my kryptonite. They present to me this entire world for me to inhabit while I am playing it. I get to set my troubles aside on the shelf and be someone else for awhile, even if that someone else is just sorta the idealized version of me. The above image is something I commissioned from my friend AmmosArt for the 7th anniversary of this blog, and it shows some of my characters in various games… and there is a similarity between them. The character of “Belghast” has a certain appearance and I seek to create it as closely to that mold as the game will allow me. I think ultimately it is the me I sorta wish I was?

The Actual Bel with Josie

I am not this person however, and while I am largely okay with the bumbling oaf that I am in real life… there are times when it is really enjoyable to stop being me and become someone else for awhile. It is fun to become a person of action rather than to be forever locked in this overly cerebral state of indecision and self doubt. The most disturbing self realization that I had years ago… is that effectively “Belghast” is just Adrian Paul from the Highlander… with a beard. It is really weird the baggage that you carry along with you in your psyche, but I remember being super into that show as a teen.

My Blood Elf Paladin in World of Warcraft – PC

I think why I like games where you can grind your way in skill and level, is that they ultimately allow you to feel powerful. There is so much of my own life where I largely feel powerless over the actions swirling around me. I know this sounds weird given that I manage a fairly large team and have moved up in my career considerably since starting it in 1998. However no matter what my station in the working world is, there are just so many things that always feel out of my own control. I am always relying on the whims of someone else and never really feel like I have complete control of my own destiny. Instead I am just reacting to the things as they come and making the best possible decision I can at any given time.

Ghosts of Tsushima – Base PS4

In a game however, I am the ultimate arbiter of my fate. As I level up, gain new equipment I eventually reach a state near the end of the game where I am powerful and a force to be reckoned with. The thing is… it also has the side benefit of happening within a safe closed box that doesn’t impact others. So much of power is wielded in the real world by the selfish and the cruel in fulfillment of their twisted fantasies. Games allow me to safely act out upon those power fantasies while saving the day and being the big damned hero, rather than doing so in a more harmful manner. When it becomes too much, I can just log out or power down the console and move on with my very real life, all without any negative impact on others in the process.

Mass Effect Andromeda – PC

Games act as a sort of wish fulfillment. I wish I was a better person, and at times I wish I was off on grand adventures. I wish I was saving the galaxy or at least a village full of people from a rampaging horde of monsters. Games allow me to live all of these lives within the span of a couple dozen hours, and still log right back out and keep my normal life as well. There are times I think that games have been what have kept me sane, as I have dealt with all sorts of issues over the years. The truth is it is really my friends that I have made through gaming that have become the large extended family and support structure that I needed. I love my gaming family that puts up with me even when I am being a little boorish. Ultimately gaming is an escape for me, and I am very thankful that it gives me a relatively safe vehicle for relaxation.

Changing A Fandom

by

Morning Folks! Today represents the first day of what will hopefully be 31 days of writing prompts to hopefully give you some ideas as we ease into this “low key” Blaugust event. As a result I have recruited a bunch of other bloggers to help me share the prompts with you, and since I made this thing up… I get the honor of kicking things off. For those who have not been following along at home, Blaugust is an event that we run every year where originally I challenged folks to write 31 posts in a single month. Given the times we are living in, we moved this original event up to April and had Blapril this year as a way of hopefully giving folks something else to think about while we were all in lockdown.

However now that we are finding ourselves still several months in living in lockdown mode, the greater community wanted to do something to mark the normal running of Blaugust. As a result each day a new blogger is going to share a prompt with you, and each day that blogger is going to lead you to the blog of the person who will post the next prompt in sequence. For more information you should really just check out my guide post. It should give you a better run down of exactly what is going to happen. If you want to participate, all you have to do is grab the prompts that interest you and write your own posts based on them. I technically wrote most of the prompts, but I threw them in a randomizer and assigned them out so that I didn’t exactly know which one I would be getting.

Blaugust Promptapalooza – Prompt 1

If you could change anything about one of your core fandoms, what would it be?

Blaugust as a whole started as a game blog thing, and over the years I have been trying to make tweaks to open it up to bloggers of other fandoms. However for me… my core fandom will likely always be gaming, more specifically video games. If you want even more specificity… then I am probably most attached to online gaming in the form of MMORPGs. So if I could change anything about gamer culture, it would be to make it a whole lot more inclusive. As a whole gamers can be a horrible toxic lot, and it is really hard to justify this to anyone looking from the outside in. That said there are also amazing pockets of pure joy that take place within gaming, and it is really hard to reconcile how both exist and can often times shift on a dime.

I think we have a few problems that escalate the issue. For starters, there is still a chunk of gaming that does not view themselves as being part of the mainstream. They define themselves as being a niche culture and fight hard to protect anything that tries to change that. This insular attitude tries to push anything out that might serve to endanger their “fun”. This has so many different representations but one of the biggest that you see is the “battle between like objects”. I legitimately randomly picked a screenshot, but it will serve as an illustration. This is The Division 2, it lives in the genre known as the looter shooter… and has major competition from Destiny 2 and Warframe each with their own very stratified communities.

In the case of all three games, they are more or less fighting over the same pool of players to some extent and this is absolutely felt by the player base. So instead of playing all three and determining which one fits the specific tastes of a player, you will see segments of these communities actively bashing the other two. You see a lot of reactionary posts on Reddit or YouTube videos talking about how this is the game you should be playing and cataloging all of the wrongs with the others within the peer group. I mean I feel like this comes from the very real fear that you need players in a game to keep it active and for it to survive, but unfortunately pushing other players away is not exactly a great way of accomplishing the goal of a thriving community.

Another type of exclusion that I see an awful lot is what can be collectively termed as “Git Gud” culture. There is a constant thread of trying to push “scrubs” out of the community and force them to play better. I think in some ways this starts off as a somewhat toxic altruism… like that players are being “bad” because they don’t know any better so folks will take it upon themselves to “educate the bads”. I mean there is an awful lot of hyper cringe content in the early years of this blog that would fall into this category. The problem however is that this does not take into account that folks often times come to a game for different reasons. There is the false assumption that every player is playing a game for the exact same reasons you are.

For example I don’t play games these days to optimize my skill rotation or to be better than every other player. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my very real obligations and have a moment to chill out in a world where I feel powerful, and that does not have any of the stresses that my daily life does. I am a bad player, or at least I am in the eyes of those who feel like optimal play should be a requirement for entry. I am honestly a fairly decent player to be truthful, but I feel so much stress at the thought of doing anything with other players because I might run into someone who is going to get all up in my shit because I pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. I realize this is mostly a mental block on my part, but it is one influenced by lots of real life experiences with very toxic players.

On this last point, gaming is very much still struggles with anything other a White CIS Male Hetero narrative. I am using this image as an example because you notice, whoever compiled this… did not include the Shepard voiced by Jennifer Hale in this image. So much of the advertising around Mass Effect also focused on the male character arc, so much so that it feels like they are intending that to be the default state even though everything I have heard is that the female arc is just plain more enjoyable. Gaming struggles at representation in a way that is natural and organic and has this bad habit of tokenism.

Another reference point, this week footage of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla started circulating showing two male warriors “embracing”. I’ve seen a lot of backlash over this, including one twitter threading going on about how “no one asked for this” and to “leave politics out of video games”. The thing is… so many have begged for more casual and natural representation of something other than the hetero-normative over the course of the last few decades. The fact it still invokes an outrage is the sign of how desperately we need it woven into the tapestry of our stories. In gaming there is such a long way to go before there is a clear “default” path and a clear “other” path.

All of these things are about less gate keeping in video games, and more inclusion of different viewpoints. The players need to evolve, but at the same time the games need to keep pushing us to evolve. It is important that we focus on what we enjoy, and less on what games are doing to make sure others are enjoying themselves as well. One of the other important points of view that I have reached over the years, is that it is okay if you decide a game “just isn’t for you”. You don’t have to play everything, and god knows with as much content as being released each year there is no way you will ever be able to in the first place. I would love us to reach a point where we can just be happy that nice things exist for other people even if we don’t want to partake of them ourselves.

The Next Blogger

Tomorrow you will be able to find the next prompt in Blaugust Promptapalooza over at Azerothian Life. This is a really great blog by @Dragonray and focuses primarily on her adventures in the World of Warcraft. There is often times a side focus on glorious transmoggy goodness that I definitely appreciate. We all know that is the TRUE end game of MMORPGs, and I personally end up transferring gold over to alts just so I can afford to keep up appearances. So check Azerothian Life out tomorrow to continue this “blog crawl”

Blaugust Promptapalooza Guide

by

Good morning everyone! We are nearing the beginning of August and with that comes the beginning of a Blaugust event. This year has not exactly gone as planned and in an attempt to raise spirits back in April, we celebrated what is traditionally the “Blaugust” event. However there had been some rumblings within the community of wanting to do something in August. It was too soon to do a proper “thirty one days of posting challenge”, but we still wanted to do something to mark the traditional time period.

What we are doing instead is something that I am calling “Promptapalooza” and it is effectively a blogging relay. I’ve gathered up a number of volunteers and each day during the event a new blogger will be sharing a prompt with the community and writing about it. For everyone participating in the festivities, be it a prompt bearer or just a content creator watching from the sidelines, this should in theory give us thirty one days worth of prompts to hopefully inspire some interesting topics. Most of the prompts are designed to be fairly general since as we expand our community it is less specifically “gaming focused”.

Participant Blogs and Dates

To kick things off here is a list of the various “Prompt Bearers” and their blogs, along with the days that they will be posting a prompt. For those who want to cheat, you can see the full list of participants along with tentative topics here, but be warned some of these topics may change as we get closer to the actual date of posting. The idea being that this event will also serve as a “parade of homes” as we call it here, as each new post will identify who will be posting the next days prompt.

How This Works

Since I apparently have a knack for over complicating things, the way this is going to work has changed a little bit after some discussion with the Blaugust community as a whole. Here is an attempt at a straight forward rundown of how the process is going to go, and here is also hoping that we manage to pull this off without someone getting confused along the way.

  • On the date specified above, a given content creator is going to share a prompt with the community.
    • The content of the post is in theory going to address that specific prompt.
    • Content creators have been assigned a prompt, but also have been given leverage to swap these out as they see fit.
      • Side note: Prompt bearers, please let me know if you plan on swapping topics so I can keep the master list updated. Any topics that are getting swapped out are listed down below as “spares”.
  • Near the bottom of a days post, the content creator will share the name and site link for the next content creator in sequence. This will lead the community to where they can find the next days prompt.
  • Everyone “playing along at home” should receive thirty one days worth of fresh prompts to pick and choose which ones they wish to create content based on.
  • The process should also shine the light on the various prompt bearers sites and hopefully drive traffic to them for participating.
  • When a prompt based topic is shared, please use the Hashtag #Blaugust2020 in order to increase visibility and allow folks to find them easily.

A Low Key Drop In Blaugust

My hope is that this spurs some conversation and inspires folks to write about some of these topics. I greatly appreciate all of the individual content creators who have signed up for this process. I realize it was a bit contorted to get off the ground, but I extremely thankful for all of the support. It has been the strangest year on the books and with it we have each had to adjust to a bunch of challenges along the way. The goal with the “promptapalooza” is to create something that folks will feel fine dropping in and out of as they see topics that inspire them.

As always the discord is open for discussion as we go through this event, and my “inbox” is always open to questions. I will be trying to keep this post with clarifications if they are needed. I hope this goes well and as always I greatly appreciate all of the help that I get from our broader community. Without you all out there cheering me on, there would not be a Blaugust.