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Random Screenshots #3

February 23, 2017 by Belghast

This is another one of those mornings when I feel like I don’t have much of anything to talk about. Work encroached upon my gaming time, first with a meeting that I did not get out of until 6 pm… when I normally get out of the office around 4/4:30. Second when I did get home I had a bunch of things that I needed to look into given that we are still ironing out the issues with a brand new website launch. As a result by the time I finished up I largely just crashed on the sofa and watched some Black Mirror as I had not touched season 3. That show is extremely creepy, but also something that I cannot really stop watching. It is a sort of technological tales of the crypt, and if you have never watched the show… be prepared for some disturbing content. That said it is still very much worth your time and the latest season has at least one gem scattered among the digital nightmares in the form of the San Junipero episode. Anyways this morning is going to be a random screenshot post morning because I am not sure what else to really talk about. I am still fairly groggy and probably shouldn’t have finished the 4th episode last night, and instead just headed on to bed.

I am not entirely certain of the context, but this is of course a screenshot from Wildstar. I believe it is from the moon mission where you have to figure out what happened to all of the miners. Even though I have long struggled to really click with this game, I cannot deny how much of an interesting vision it really is. The art direction was on point and everything feels like it exists in the same shared technicolor delusion. For whatever reason I never really liked how spastic their flavor of hotbar combat felt. Most recently I paid a little money to be able to create a Chua Warrior and I found it enjoyable… but still not really clicking as hard as I would have liked. Honestly this game and Guild Wars 2 sort of exist in the same space for me… where they are equally interesting to visit but not exactly the same of place I want to call home. I will say though that the people who do play the game regularly are amazing and I am super happy to have a whole bunch of them occupying my social media streams. This is one of those games that I root hard for… just from a distance.

We go from a game that I don’t really get fully, to one that I absolutely do… but still don’t end up playing that often. I believe this screenshot is from one of the opening shots of Makeb which was the sequence of content I last played during a December 2015 binge of the game thanks to Force Awakens Star Wars hype. I honestly thought I would similarly return during the Rogue One hype machine but it never actually materialized. I realize I am missing so much great content, and I keep saying that one of these days when I hit a lull in whatever other games I happen to be playing that I will swoop back to Star Wars the Old Republic and gobble up all of the goodies I have missed. I still have yet to start any of the Shadow of Revan content… let alone Fallen Empire or Eternal Throne. I did have an active sub, but I let that lapse at some point… they keep roping me in with offers of “subs get X shiny bauble” and then I never actually end up playing. I should in theory pop back in before this last bit of sub time lapses and I am stuck playing in freemium hell.

On to yet another game that I have really fond memories of but never end up playing. This is I believe a screenshot from one of the betas for The Secret World. To the best of my knowledge this was me creating my very first character. To be truthful I never was a huge fan of the character creation system in TSW, as it always felt like I never could create exactly the character that I wanted to create. However on so many levels I loved this game, but the biggest problem is attempting to return to it. Since you can repeat almost every quest it becomes extremely hard to see just what you have completed and what is new and something you should focus on. When they release an issue I find it hard to actually track down all of the things that have been added and given that I last actively played during “Last Train to Cairo” which was issue number six… and they are currently on fifteen there is a ton of content I have missed. I just find it extremely hard to get back into the game after being gone for so long… and given all of the systems that they have seemingly loosely tacked onto the base experience.

I don’t have an awful lot to say about this screenshot other than I thought it looked cool, so I decided to post it. This is of course from Farcry 3 Blood Dragon, which is this insane 80s movie romp. If you took every 80s sci-fi film and distilled it to its campy roots, then dumped all of that pure essence in a blender… you wind up with Blood Dragon. If you have never checked it out, you probably really should given that it regularly dips down into the $5 territory. It is a completely stand alone experience and does not require Farcry… nor does it really have anything to do with the Farcry Franchinse at all other than modeling some of the open world roaming gameplay.

Games Played 2016 Edition

December 30, 2022December 30, 2016 by Belghast

First I want to take a quick moment to talk about the awesome avatar adorning the right side of this paragraph. Some time ago I talked about doing the Icecrown Challenge and to the best of my knowledge most of the folks I challenged have since completed their own and donated some money to the cause. I still feel slightly sorry for Mort who ended up taking almost 50 minutes to get through the raid because had apparently never actually raided during Wrath of the Lich King. I did the challenge because one… I end up doing Icecrown Citadel almost every week anyways, and two because of the weird connection that Ratsel and I just found out that we have. Then of course there is always the part that it is a good cause. Of all of the reasons however… none of them was to win any prizes but apparently I did. The prize I happened to win was the amazing Faebelina doing an avatar, and instead of my character I chose to have her do a “Me”. So I supplied her some images and set her loose in a specific direction… and largely wanted to see what she came up with on her own. The end result is something really interesting that so far everyone has said “yup, that looks like you”. In the end though I really need to get the hat, hoodie and shirt so I can cosplay myself. I am mostly using it on my “real life” accounts but I wanted to show it off nonetheless because I think it is really cool.

Full Spreadsheet Link

Last year I realized that with the whole daily blogging thing that I had a decent way of telling exactly what games I had played during the year. Like I often do I took to Google Sheets and started a spreadsheet trying to track what games I played during what months. This year I went sorta overboard with that concept and you see the image above as a result. Essentially if I talked about a game during a given month… I put a 1 in that square and ultimately colored it it. Then in the last column I did a calculation that added up all of the months that a given game appeared in… and as a result you have the sort above… by number of months played and then alphabetically. The first thing we can take away from this graphic is that there is no denying the fact that I am an online and MMO gamer. Based on the data above I played the following MMOs…

World of Warcraft – All Twelve Months
Destiny – 10 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 10 Months
Rift – 8 Months
Diablo 3 – 6 Months
The Division – 5 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 4 Months
Overwatch – 4 Months
ArcheAge – 3 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 3 Months

As far as non-online games that I played… you end up dropping down significantly into single digit territory with only a handful of games like Fallout 4, Skyrim, and No Man’s Sky making that repeat list. The big shocker for me is always seeing all the various singlets I end up playing throughout the year that I completely forget about. All told I played 57 different games during the year… which seems like a lot but is a bit down from last year and it’s 67 unique games. So I feel like the real tale of the year is just how much World of Warcraft and Destiny I wound up playing. Sure FFXIV is up there at 10 months but some of that is a technicality while I was subbed but only logging in once a week or every few weeks. Destiny and World of Warcraft really were constant things throughout the course of the year. This was the year I feel like I really learned to love WoW again, more than just a passing fancy that let me play with my friends. With the launch of Legion I was legitimately and unabashedly happy to be playing the game for the first time since the launch of Cataclysm. In fact Destiny dropped off the Radar only for the blip around the launch of Legion because I was just playing that game so damned much.

Even More Madness

Full Spreadsheet Link

The problem with spreadsheets is that they crave more data… and once I start down a path I tend to go into really insane territory. I had data that I had collected for 2015, and now data that I had collected for 2016. I wondered what would happen if I went all the way back to 2013, the year I first started the daily blogging experiment. Now of note… the 2013 data is super spotty given that I did not officially start the daily blogging thing until April. However I managed to piece together some data based on my archive of screenshots mixed with actual data from the blog. The end result is a view of the games I have played since 2013 copied into my weird google sheets format. Once again you can see that I really am an MMO Gamer overall. The top ten games played in total number of months is as follows…

World of Warcraft – 37 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 35 Months
Rift – 35 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 24 Months
Destiny – 19 Months
Diablo 3 – 16 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Wildstar – 12 Months
Everquest II – 11 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 9 Months
Trove – 9 Months

Of note… Trove and Guild Wars 2 are technically tied for 10th place with the same number of months. The only one that gets a little weird is Elder Scrolls Online, because I am counting time spent playing in the Alpha and Beta process which I could not of course talk about on my blog. However I entered that process in February of 2013 and we had one or two events a month through launch. During that four year period I played 172 different unique games. Again however if you look at the distribution of titles played… you have to go pretty far on the list until you get into single player territory with Minecraft, Fallout 4 and Final Fantasy V leading there. Minecraft technically can be a multiplayer game, but generally speaking I go on single player building binges. Final Fantasy V pretty much accounts for all of the years I have gotten talked into participating in the Four Job Fiesta thanks to Ashgar.

At some point I want to true up the data even further by going through my screenshot archive and sorting it by dates. I have literally every screenshot I have taken over the last several years archived and sorted by game sitting on a network attached storage device. I am maybe a little obsessive about such things, especially since screenshots tend to play such a large role in my blog. I like having a deep archive of things that I can go back to for getting reference material. From that I should be able to get a few more games that maybe I played but didn’t actually write about. However I think for the most part this represents a pretty true picture of my gameplay for the last four years. It took awhile to compile, but much of it was done while hanging out downstairs on the laptop as we watched something on television. The end result gives me a really interesting tool to use going forward, and I plan on keeping the spreadsheet up to date as I go through 2017. The biggest thing we can take away from this however is that… firstly I am a creature of habit and keep returning to the same games over and over. Secondly I tend to be one of those players that keeps returning to MMOs that I have played in the past to see how they are getting along. Lastly… I really do not play the number of single player games that I would like to play, mostly because while playing them I get lonely. It feels strange to roam around a world without lots of other people sharing it with me.

Regularly Playing: September/October Edition

March 7, 2025October 3, 2016 by Belghast

Once again I have let a bit of time pass since my last one of these posts. As a result I am going to do a combo post since I think I can for the most part predict what the next month will bring gaming wise. The general idea is that every so often I “true up” my sidebar, and bring it into alignment with what I am actually playing on a regular basis. Some of these might be an every day occurrence, but they represent a regular rotation of games you are likely to see me talking about. Since I am apparently unable to do these monthly, it might just be a sort every other month thing. Originally I admit this was designed as easy to conjure up content, for when I was struggling to think of anything to write… and somehow became something more in the process.

To Those Remaining

World of Warcraft

At this very moment this is sort of my gaming “main squeeze”. It feels really strange to once again be enthralled by WoW after it teetered on the brink of being removed from this list for so long. Legion was extremely good, as were the events leading up to it. The only slight problem I am having is that my army of alts is seeing far less love than they did in Warlords. Right now I have two characters to 110 the new level cap, and in truth I could probably never alt again and still have plenty of things to do. The catch there however is that I once again want access to tradeskills that my army of alts had. The first alt I pushed to 110 was done for the fact that I wanted access to mining… not necessarily because I wanted to play that character. In fact once I hit 110 I have tried really hard to shift that character to DPS mode after largely leveling as a tank, because I am not sure if I really like tanking as a Paladin. Paladin tanking just doesn’t feel anywhere near as good as Warrior tanking does right now, and as a result when I tank instances for my friends… I find myself missing Belghast. Instead I am trying to focus on being a Retribution paladin, which works well enough given that the bodyguard for Paladins is a tank. In any case… I could rattle on at length about this game but chances are you too are playing and have your own stories. Legion was the expansion where Blizzard learned so many lessons and I believe in some small way started transitioning the game to an interesting future.

Final Fantasy XIV

This game is barely holding in there and I wrote about my feelings at length the other day. There is just something about the game that isn’t clicking with me, however over the weekend I found out that the story line is leading to apparently a pretty interesting place. That means that over the course of this week I will be popping in and consuming locust-like the new content patch in the hopes of being able to talk about it on next weeks AggroChat. For this reason more than any others I am leaving it on the list, in the hopes that wherever they are going with the story will rekindle my fires of caring about the game. For the time being however it teeters on the brink of removal, knowing that even if I do… it is certain to make its way back eventually. Final Fantasy XIV is one of those games that I truly love… even if I don’t necessarily want to be playing it at the moment.

Rift

Rift is also teetering precariously on the precipice of being removed from the list. The only reason being because I just simply am not playing right now. I have too much other stuff that is keeping me engaged and at the moment my “rift time” involves logging in every day to collect rewards and then logging right back out. That said I know that Starfall Prophecy will be coming soon and with it a number of changes that sound like they are going to be excellent for the game. For the moment however I am collecting the pre-launch currency and seeing just how many I can end up getting before things go live.

To The Returning and New

Destiny: Rise of Iron

I knew this one would not stay gone long from the list, especially with the impending release of an expansion. I’ve talked about my thoughts on Rise of Iron, and while it seems strange to call it an expansion… it is definitely a return to amazing Destiny fun. The more time I spend in the plaguelands the more I love them, and it seems like right now it is fitting this role of wanting to play something… that doesn’t require much of me. I end up booting it up quite often when I first get home from work, or if I am trying to wind down before going to bed. It lets me get in… kill some baddies and walk away with some loot… some of it is actually usable. There are some interesting things going on, namely that engrams seem to upgrade in quality way more often. I opened two legendary engrams last night and got exotic items from them for example, and while blue engrams seem to be light locked at 340… they are upgrading into legendary items pretty often as well. I am definitely enjoying myself again and looking forward to being able to hit the light levels that will allow me to do group content once again.

Guild Wars 2

Now in the “games I never thought I would be adding to this list” category we have Guild Wars 2. I have a bit of a sordid past with this game, so much so that I don’t even think I have an existing sidebar graphic for it. However this month thanks to Tam latching onto it… it is seeing a bit of traction among the AggroChat crew. As a result I am begrudgingly playing it much the same way as Tam is begrudgingly playing World of Warcraft. We still have yet to run a dungeon, which is something we need to remedy and the next time the folks are doing content in this game… I really need to log in and join in. For the most however any time I would spend in this game is getting gobbled up by the Legion machine. I really need to give it more of a fair shake… in spite of not quite feeling like I want it to feel.

To Those Parting

Pokemon Go

This one is leaving not entirely of my own choice. For quite awhile now this has been my go to boredom mobile game and a huge motivation to get out into the world and walk. However recently they released a patch that has effectively locked me out of the game. For whatever reason my phone shows up as it has been rooted… even though it is not. This is a problem that is happening to a ton of people playing this game, and I have a feeling that it is caused by the fact that there is an update that fails to patch into my phone. I’ve gone so far as to wipe the phone and take it back to a factory rom and still run into the problems with one patch failing to load past 28%. As a result I am barred from participating in this game, and it is leaving the list. I keep hoping that at some point they will remove this patch and I can get back to catching pokemon, but I highly doubt that.

Diablo 3

This season was a bit of a struggle because at the same time it launched… the pre-launch event started up in Legion. Any time I would have been spending in Diablo 3, got gobbled up by World of Warcraft. Grace and I however made it through the season journey, or at least in my case far enough to unlock the cosmetic items. There is no way I am going to be spending enough time to unlock the stash tab this time around, and my support structure in this game is also devoting 100% of their time to WoW. So for the time being I am removing it from the list until next time a season starts up.

No Mans Sky

This one never really stood a chance. It launched at a time when I was super devoted to a bunch of other games… and quite honestly I just have not given it the time needed to really sink its teeth in. The bit I played I enjoyed, and I could see myself spending hours playing it. The big problem however is it is not a game I am playing with friends… and felt super lonely. There are times I need this sort of game, and I am sure when I get into one of those extended funk periods I will break it back out and roam the lonelyverse.

Regularly Playing: July/August Edition

March 7, 2025August 14, 2016 by Belghast

I just realized the other day that it had been a long while since I had done one of my regularly playing posts. The general idea is to true up my sidebar list of games and bring it into alignment with the games that I am actually playing on a fairly regular basis. Some of these might not be every day occurrences but they represent the regular rotation of games you are likely to see me talking about. At some point however I fell off the wagon and went the entire month of July without any form of an update. As a result I am doing this to cover both July and August and get me up to date.

To Those Remaining

World of Warcraft

I am legitimately playing World of Warcraft more actively than I have in years. More than likely this is the most seriously I have played since before the launch of Cataclysm. I am really enjoying the game, and the changes to the various specs… and even enjoying the Legion launch event more. Over the last few days I have been using this event as a bit of a springboard to help level up some of my sub 100 characters because every two events you participate in seems to be roughly a levels worth of experience, even in the 90s. So I took my Shadowpriest last night for example from 92 to 94 in two full rounds of the event. As far as the rest of the game there is still a ton of stuff I want to do, that mostly centers around running older content and collecting appearances. To say I am looking forward to the Legion Launch is a bit of an understatement.

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand has fallen a little bit by the wayside. It is that game that I am logging into only to raid… which ironically is traditionally my stance with World of Warcraft. I am loving the Monday night raid team, and we are now starting to do more serious content. I still have little to no drive however to level or gear, at least until the content we are doing requires it. That might be a thing that happens soon because we have pretty much defeated all of the “easy” end game content and are now starting down the path of the more difficult stuff. However it feels amazing to have “the band back together” and doing raids together as a team.

Rift

At the very least right now I am logging in every day to participate in the Starfall Prophecy launch event, which is namely collecting prophecies that I can then later turn in for rewards. The pre-order bonus means that we will get access to some awesome stuff like the artifact finding mount, and I want to make sure I don’t miss out on any of that. Otherwise I need to really hunt for a group of players that are more active. I don’t want to disband the House Stalwart guild or anything, but I might consider moving Belghast off to another guild, because I would like to see Comet of Ahnket before the expansion lands since the lore seems like it will give me a headstart into understanding what is going on. Additionally I want to spend a sleepy afternoon at some point doing more Intrepid Adventures. Those things are just absolutely fun as hell and it is a style of “LFR” that I wish more games would look into implementing.

To The Returning and New

Diablo 3

As stated when I originally removed it from the list, I knew that it would be a limited time thing. With the beginning of this month came the launch of Season 7 of Diablo 3, and a return of several of us to actively playing again. This time around we do not have nearly the throng of players that we did with season six, but myself, Grace and Thalen are all fairly active. This time feels a little cheap though because we all seemed to opted for the fastest possible clearing class… or at least our view on that. The Demon Hunter is a powerhouse and one that you can get up and running insanely quickly. By the time we dinged 70 we were already pushing content hard and fast, and after roughly a weeks time I am now clearing greater rifts in the 50s like they are a cakewalk. The only question now is just how serious I am going to be on trying to get that extra stash slot. Right now there is so much going on, that I am afraid Diablo 3 is going to fall by the wayside.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go is something that did not even exist on my radar when I did the last “Recently Playing” and has been something that has dominated my life since. I have gone through the stages of grief with this game, and have reached a point where I continue to play it without really understanding why. I wrote the other day about some of my frustrations, and they are very real. However still… anytime I leave the house I check for nearby Pokemon each time I stop and get out of the car. As the heat starts to chill the hell out… and we no longer have 100 degree days I will probably start resuming my evening pokestrolls. However when it is 100 degrees at 9pm at night… it is just too damned hot to go out roaming too far. I hope this game gets some much needed changes, because the ones thusfar feel like they are taking it in the wrong direction. Niantic Labs still does not seem to understand that they made a MMO.

No Man’s Sky

This one is seriously brand new… but I have a feeling that over the coming weeks it is going to be a new obsession for me. I called it Interstellar Skyrim, and it invokes the same sort of feelings in me. The problem being… all of this is pending you can actually get it running on your machine. There are lots of problems ahead of this title before it reaches serious mass adoption, and I hope that in the coming weeks they can push through them. To say it has performance issues is the understatement of the century right now, and I am questioning my original plan to get this on the PC. That said I am committed at this point and still very much enjoying the experience.

To Those Parting

Destiny

I have so much love for Destiny, but for whatever reason I have drifted away from it in the last few weeks. In both the month of July and August I have not really played much, so I am temporarily removing it from the list. I know without a doubt in Mid-September when Rise of Iron hits, that I will be back and actively playing it again. In the meantime however I feel like I have gotten it out of my system for the moment. However if my friend Grace suddenly decides to start playing again, I will likely be right back there with guns a blazing. I think a huge part of it is that I really have not been spending all that much time up in my office where my Playstation 4 is, and instead hanging out on the sofa playing on my laptop. Much like when I remove Diablo 3 from the list… this is absolutely going to change in the coming months and I am sure I will have yet another resurgence.

ArcheAge

I feel like ArcheAge is a casualty of simply too much other stuff going on right now. At the beginning of July I had a bit of a renaissance with this game and managed to push through to fourty six… and then the content seemed to dry up a bit. The quests are still there, but they seem to be generally less plentiful, and the progress I was making felt a bit bogged down. As a result this sort of just fell by the wayside, and I am sure at some point I will reignite my fires for this game because at the end of the day I still very much like it. The biggest thing that came from this last journey is that I realized that PVP isn’t as big of a hurdle as I was expecting. I have technically spent the last dozen or so levels in pvp enabled areas… and really did not run into a single issue. Flagged players avoided me, and I avoided them and we continued questing along happily. At some point I am sure I will return, but for the time being I am removing it from my list of “active” games.