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Regularly Playing: June 2019 Edition

June 4, 2019June 4, 2019 by Belghast

For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog. I failed miserably at the last incarnation, because the side bar never actually got updated. Additionally May was a crazy month with all of the weather issues and I never quite got one of these done. Instead I am shifting to a June edition where I attempt to start doing these towards the start of the month instead of the end of the month. I seemingly inhaled my coffee this morning so… lets do this!

To Those Remaining

I continue to truck along happily in Dragalia Lost and especially now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 there is rarely a night that goes by that I don’t at a minimum play through my dailies. I’ve said this before but there is a release cadence of content that keeps me engaged and the fact that another character summon is just around the corner. The whole summoning process feels much better than that Wyrmprints have been completely removed from the mix. After playing effectively the entire time I have gathered up a good stable of five star characters that I have not even bothered leveling yet. I still sorta wish there was a switch version.

If you have read the blog over the last few days you will know that I am fully engaged with Diablo 3 right now. Last night I attempted to farm some more chests but sleep claimed me. I am however on a mission to get the Avarice Conquest and will get there sooner or later. I love Diablo 3 so much and while I fade in and out of its focus… I will always sooner or later return to it.

While I am not playing a ton of it… I am still very much engaged with Final Fantasy XIV and am looking forward to the upcoming head start on June 28th for Shadowbringers the next expansion. Pretty excited especially considering the drastic class changes that I think will lead to a more accessible environment. Right now the plan is to level the Samurai through the story quests and then level Warrior with Dungeon Finder given that Tank queues are a breeze. I’ve always done it the other way around and I think a lot of what leads to my burn out is trying to claw my way up to level as a DPS when I could simply go the easy route and level through the story.

While I am not playing it a ton I am still fairly engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena and the War of the Spark expansion seems to be pretty interesting. We talked a bit about this on the podcast but I am really wishing they would make it so that constructed is a format that is always available for play, given that is probably my favorite of the “event” types. It also serves as an amazing way to obtain cards from a specific set.

To The New and Returning

I did a lengthy post about this the other day but I am starting to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is as close as we will probably ever get to a proper Symphony of the Night sequel. While I only have the E3 demo version right now, I will be getting access to the full thing on my birthday… June 18th and plan on picking it up for pretty much every console that it will be available for. It is likely going to be a toss up between Switch and PC as to which version I actually play the most.

With the Season of Opulence starting I believe today… I’ve been poking my head back into Destiny 2 of late to try and reacquaint myself with the way that the game as a whole feels. I completely missed the Season of the Drifter because I was off doing other things, and the start of a new Season seems to be a good time to get engaged again. I still very much love the game but at this point am so far behind that I am not exactly sure what the most ideal catch up mechanic would be. This is the problem with Destiny as a whole is that there isn’t a painfully obvious way to gain a ton of light levels quickly.

I’ve also of late been spending a significant amount of time playing Elder Scrolls Online. A new expansion released and it has made me want to start playing again… in spite of not actually being willing to start the new content. Instead I am working my way through Vvardenfell… aka two expansions ago? The game is pretty great and ends up filling the same niche that Star Wars the Old Republic does… in that I mostly want to come in and gobble up a bunch of story content and then wander off.

To Those Departing

Grim Dawn

I know I will revisit this game again, but for now I am not playing it and it leaves the list. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have stopped playing sometime mid April. Still a really great game and I expect to get the itch at some point in the near future… but being engaged with Diablo 3 again mostly pushed it off the table.

Marvel Future Fight

I played this a significant amount of time for a short period of time… and now find it really hard to get back into it. I feel like I hit the free to play wall where I have done as much of the content as I want to do before needing to spend a significant chunk of money. The grind set in and all of the things that would offer advancement require either a lot of money or a lot of time.

Mortal Kombat 11

Going forward I am going to try to filter titles like this off the list in part because there are a lot of things that I play furiously for a weekend and then never play again. Mortal Kombat 11 was one of these and while I fully expect to return to it periodically it isn’t really worthy of the moniker of “regularly playing”. Its still a really cool game and you should check it out especially when it goes on sale.

Outward

This again is another example of a game that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the list since I played it obsessively for a few nights and then never again. I’m going to start an honorable mentions section below for some of the games where I play in this manner because I have a few of them this month as well.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I came in… I gobbled up the entire Eternal Throne storyline and then wandered off once I started the content immediately following that. I have no clue why I suddenly stopped playing but I did. I expect honestly at some point soon to add this back to the list especially with a new full expansion on the way. I still really like this game and am happy it found its feet post launch. I would love more of the content along the lines of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne because both were phenomenal.

Honorable Mentions

Again for those who didn’t read all of the blurbs above, this is a section I am adding in part because every month there are a handful of titles that I play furiously for a few days and then wander away from. They don’t really deserve the title of “regularly playing” but they are also worth noting.

While there is actually a game here I am not entirely certain if it is a game I want to play. This is something I have been poking my head in to check on since the backer alpha began. I had a few fun nights with it but more or less have consigned it to hibernation once again.

I have no clue how much of this I will be playing. I randomly installed it and started playing a few weekends back after watching a series of videos on it by Gaijin Hunter. It is a really cool game and I think it might be something that I could settle into as a bizarre “what if capcom had made skyrim” experience. Not quite ready to add it to the regularly playing list, will see if it returns by the end of the month.

I had a lot of fun with this game right around the time of launch and then I wandered away… and am not exactly sure why? I really need to get back to playing it and at least make my way through the main story. I get easily distracted when it comes to gaming and I am guessing me getting into World of Warcraft Classic beta was the shiny object that caused this one.

And… last but definitely not least… we have World of Warcraft Classic the aforementioned shiny object. This is coming in as an honorable mention and not a regularly playing in part because I have forcefully pulled myself away from it. This game launches officially in August and given the amount of time you need to spend leveling in this game… I don’t see a point in burning myself out before that point. We are completely nonsense and are going to be making an attempt at 40 player raiding again. I will give more information about this as time gets closer. However for now it claims a spot on the Honorable Mentions.

Self Exodus

January 31, 2019 by Belghast

Here comes some random commentary. I have for the most part been in support of the Epic Games store and snagging some of their exclusives… like for example Hades and Ashen. Those are games for which pre-orders had not started on any platform and announcing that they would only be available on this somewhat new storefront was perfectly reasonable. I was largely okay with The Division 2 but I felt it was a little shady to shift gears a few months before the launch of the game. I had not pre-ordered, and if I had been planning on doing so… I would have probably just ordered through the UPlay store to cut out the middle man. However what just happened with Metro Exodus is in the “shady as fuck” territory, given that the game is roughly two weeks from launch and had been in pre-orders since at least E3. That is way too late in the game to be massively shifting gears like that and THQ Nordic the sub company should have known that they would be screwing things up for THQ Nordic the parent company.

Still I am largely cool with Epic Games store as a vehicle for grabbing games. Sure it feels a little spartan, but it is still a way better store front and client than Origin… a point that has been reminded of late given how much I have had to fiddle with that client thanks to Anthem. The problem I have is with the practice of taking pre-sales way the hell ahead of the games release, because frankly the term pre-order is a lie when it comes to digital software. You are not plunking down $5 to reserve your copy of a game… you are handing over your credit card information and often times being charged up front for the purchase. The thing is… whenever that process starts those vendors should be locked in stone and unchanging. If you didn’t want to support Steam six months ago… then you shouldn’t have allowed sales of your product to begin.

In truth I don’t so much fault Epic for making offers, but the company for taking that offer in Bad Faith. I get a regular stream of offers from people wanting me to place links on this site to whatever the hell it is that they are pushing… often times some sort of a casino. I don’t take the quick money because I feel like it would be violating the trust my readers have in me. I don’t necessarily have a dog in this fight however because while I have been looking forward to Metro Exodus… it was never really a day one title for me and instead something I would play considerably after release. However for those who were harmed by this action… I get the outrage. The biggest part I am confused by however is how they have stated that Steam Pre-Orders would be fulfilled and the game would be updated through that platform… but the game itself would no longer be available there. That just feels really odd and awful.

As far as gaming last night… I got the Blue Mage to 40 through lots of grinding that was relatively boring and not worth talking about. Then I swapped over and played some Destiny 2 where I completed a bunch of bounties… one of which being the weekly for Eververse. I lucked out and managed to pull the Last Word ornament… which will sit there waiting until I complete that quest chain. I did manage to push through the step where you collect a bazillion hive cores or whatever it was we were collecting. I also managed to make a little progress on the Malfeasance where I believe I am on the final step involving killing Guardians and getting invasion kills in Gambit. I had fun… but man movement felt weird after getting used to Anthem.

Speaking of which… who all will I be seeing in the weekend test happening Friday-Sunday? I’m BelghastStern over on Origin so hit me up with a friend invite.

Bungie Divorce

January 11, 2019 by Belghast

I had a totally different post planned for today, but since the news of the Activision and Bungie split was announced yesterday… there really wasn’t another topic that I would be discussing today. I also committed memery last night and cobbled together this… since yeah it is sorta relevant. So the details that we know… in 2010 Bungie entered into a 10 year publishing deal with Activision. Over the last few cycles Activision has been making a point of announcing that Destiny 2 as a franchise has been failing to live up to expectations. Behind the scenes for quite some time Bungie devs have been leaking tidbits about them feeling constrained by that relationship.

So at this point we really don’t know how the split was started… did Bungie buy out the remaining two years of the contract? Did Activision decide that Destiny 2 looked bad on their balance sheet and kicked them to the curb? Bungie learned the lesson with Microsoft and seemingly retained the rights to their intellectual property going into the arrangement with Activision, and as a result it appears that we have a newly liberated Bungie with all of the rights to keep making Destiny 2 and in theory Destiny 3… but I will talk a bit more about that later.

I think the question on a lot of minds is going to be… who’s idea was Tess Everis and the Eververse store… and will this change see the focus on this as a monetization vehicle lessen. In truth I think this was a “both of them” sort of decision and not necessarily something we can really pin entirely on the Activision Evil Empire as it were. Going into Destiny 2 I think Bungie knew they had to have some vehicle for long tailed sales… and this new version of Eververse was their answer to that. Now the shop has vacillated back and forth between being grossly unfair at release… to honestly having the deck stacked greatly in favor of the player in its current state. I talked a bit about my thoughts there in the Bright Engrams Revisited post, but I think we have seen all of the tweaks we are going to see to Eververse.

The hard truth is… there will not be a major game release that lives in the MMO space that does not include some sort of pay for cosmetics or loot box scenario. The fact that Destiny 2 hands those Bright Engrams out like Candy for playing through the content, and the fact that you can break down anything into Dust and pick items up as direct sales during the weekly resets… means to me at least that the system is actually pretty reasonable already. Sure people would prefer to simply cherry pick the items that they want each season… but I am okay with the amount of friction that exists. It gives us a reason to keep checking the store each Tuesday and to keep doing the weekly Eververse Bounties to stockpile bright dust and whatever the cores are called that unlock items from the list.

The other burning question is… who’s decision was it to move away from story driven content? This is another one that I don’t really know the answer to either… but I would tend to land that one more in the lap of Activision, given that they just pushed out a Call of Duty game with no single player story in it. I would love to see them return to story beats each time we get a major update, rather than a purely activity driven focus. I think ultimately we will have to see what Penumbra ends up being like to determine if everything is going to be like the Black Armory going forward or not. With this change however I have a whole bunch of wish list items… some of which are wildly speculative but would be amazing.

Shared Game Saves

If I understand it correctly… the Playstation exclusivity deals were between Activision and Sony… and Bungie was not necessarily a party to them but in turn constantly effected by them. I think what this means in the short term is that soon all of the formerly Playstation exclusive content will trickle down to the other platforms as soon as everything is finalized. What I hope this paves the way for however is a shared save state between all of the platforms. Sure I would love it if all of the platforms could play together at the same time… but as an easier hurdle… I would love it if I could log into my PC characters on the Xbox or PS4 so I can keep playing with friends on those platforms. At this point it would require an account merge system but I could see various ways where that might work.

Since the game largely uses an entitlement system now instead of actual items for everything but Forsaken forward… you could do some sort of a system where you choose a primary account and every other account would simply just copy over the achievements and entitlements. Of course at some point I want the ability to play with my PS4 friends while playing on the PC… and with the consoles moving further towards accepting keyboard and mouse as an input option (something both Xbox and PS4 support in limited ways currently) it might be a reasonable option. At the very least it should be completely fine for any PVE activity… with PVP being the outlier where they might still have a segregated “Console” and “PC” play lists. Look we are setting up a wish list here…. so even if it is unrealistic at this very moment… it still definitely falls on it.

Bring Back Destiny 1

It is as simple as it sounds… I would love to see all of the patrol zones and activities from Destiny 1… make an appearance in Destiny 2. They have been cherry picking elements from the first game already, but a lot of us players from Destiny 1 felt a great sense of loss in losing all the places we loved from the first game. It will take some work, but in theory they could start shimming in zones here and there as they release other content. I would love to be able to do Prison of Elders again or take on Oryx. You could even bring in some sort of a time walking like mechanic that lets you run older content without effecting the flow of the current storyline. What if there was an ascendant realm that contained pockets of these old settings or something of that sort. The Destiny story is kooky enough to be able to support it via space magic.

Table Destiny 3

Along the lines of the last topic… I would honestly love to see them completely table the discussion of a Destiny 3. Hell at this point my preference would be for them to rebrand Destiny 2 to simply be “Destiny Franchise” or something of the sort and start treating the game like a more traditional MMORPG with semi-yearly expansions that keep adding new content without doing a nuke from orbit reset every few years. Sure a new game gives players a chance to come back into the game on the same footing of every else… but I legitimately do not thing we will be gaining a much larger audience than the game already has. Destiny 2 was a big push and burned a lot of people… and getting those players back won’t happen with a new numerical release.

Keep the Course

I like the roadmaps that they are now doing… and I like that there are little trickles of new things flowing into the game every so often. Ultimately my hope is that we will see more content without the thumb of Activision… but quite honestly I am not sure that is realistic. The company will be getting a larger share of the profits… but those initial purchase profits are already a sunk cost. They are going to have to prove to us that annual pass is worth it at this point, and I am not entirely certain that Black Armory did that. Additionally they are going to have to give us other things to purchase to keep the cash flow incoming. It will be interesting to see how things move forward as we clear the rest of this year.

If they straight up released Destiny 1 for PC as a stand alone game… I would probably throw money at the screen and buy it. However if they released the content FROM Destiny 1 as an expansion to Destiny 2 that was not part of the Annual Pass content… I would probably throw MORE money at the screen. I do however think they might need to rework Eververse drastically however to give us more reasons to give them money. That does not mean that I think they need to fuck with the math and make Bright Engrams stupid, but instead offer other avenues. Like for example… if I could spend bright dust/silver to unlock shaders permanently… I would probably do that. SWTOR had that functionality of buying things as unlocked for your entire account, so in theory they could do something similar.

Additionally I would throw lots of money at the screen if they created an expansion that added better cosmetic options to the game, and allowed us to create outfits of our favorite gear appearances… decoupling them from what we happened to be actually wearing. Basically there are ways that they can keep improving the game, but also creating vehicles that get us to spend money with them. There are folks that are predicting a switch to a free to play model like Fortnite, but I question if that would actually work. Destiny 2 is not exactly a game that is great at onboarding new players, and they would have to think long and hard about how to address that problem.

At this point I have rambled at length… but these are some of my thoughts. What are your thoughts about this announcement?

Seasonal Light Cap Get

January 3, 2019 by Belghast

As promised yesterday, today we return at least for a bit to proper gaming news… or more so the news of the gaming I have been up to over the break. I’ve been spending a significant amount of time playing Destiny 2 which is not terribly shocking. That said I did manage to hit 650 light, the current cap for the rest of the current season and even have managed to push up my standard loadout of Breakneck, Ikelos Shotgun and Thunderlord to that level as well. Now begins the slow process of bringing the other things I care about up to that level as well.

I also managed to get my Hunter to 50 and have finished the Warmind content now and am slowly chewing my way through Forsaken. I’ve swapped over 650 weapons and am using them to slowly push up her light level which I have managed to get to 625 in a day of trying to do this. I will probably be spending a good deal more time working on her than the Titan seeing as I hit my initial goal of hitting the light cap during the break. At some point I will probably also start working on pushing up the Warlock, but seeing as that is my least favorite class to play… it always ends up lagging behind significantly.

The core problem I am having with Destiny 2 is a pretty good one to be having. There is more content to do each week than I have time to really do it in. At launch time I could push through all of the powerful gear options in a single night, and could easily run out of things that I felt were “worth doing”… and as a result spent a good deal of time working on alts to spread out that list of things to do enough to get me through the week. With the current state of the game there is no way I have enough time to do all of the things that could create progress so instead I just focus on the things I feel like doing in a given night. I am leaving so much progression on the table in a given week that I am having to learn to be okay with it.

Lastly I have been tooling around with a weird Dark-Soulsian game called Ashen that is currently only available on Xbox One and the Epic Games store. Once you get over the fact that all of the characters are faceless poppets, the game does a much better job of making you care about the world that you are exploring in the fact that you are essentially recovering after an apocalypse. As you roam around you meet new people that you can help and in turn they join the village that you are building. They start to offer you whatever it is that they can do from forging weapons to letting you futz with your stat layout.

There are times the game reminds me of Breath of the Wild as well… albeit with way more hardcore combat. It is very easy to die in this game as pretty much everything in the world hates you. This can get a little frustrating because in my rush to attack before they can attack me… I have accidentally killed a few NPCs. I am enjoying myself quite a bit, but I am not really playing it anywhere near as much as some of the other games I have on my plate. I still thought it was worth mentioning in case anyone else was interested. They have managed to create a game that is very much in the Dark Souls genre… that is also very hopeful and not quite so soul crushing. I linked to the original trailer above.