Looter Shooter

Man on The Moon

by

Good Morning Friends! I finished up the quest for the Zephyr last night and while I absolutely hate the design… it is cool to have a stasis element sword. I am not sure what it is about the whole Dawning design ethic, but it is awful. Like I get what they are going for… a sort of new years festival thing that isn’t dominated by either the Red/Green Christmas colors or the Red/Gold Lunar New Year designs. However there is just some about the shapes of the items that I don’t really like that much. I’ve never really cared for the “Nine” themed items either, and these absolutely seem to share a similar design ethic. I kinda wish you could create weapon skins similar to how you can create universal ornaments for armor, so I could just swap this to a weapon I don’t hate.

I am slow rolling my way through leveling my light, or whatever they call it currently. I am old… I will probably never stop calling it light level. Mostly I have been getting in, knocking out a few objectives and then calling it good for the night. I still really enjoy Gambit probably the most of all of the available modes. There is something about its specific blend of elements that I really enjoy greatly. Essentially I am getting daily bounties for Dawning and then trying to figure out who I can accomplish them the easiest. Last night I had Hive and Scorn bounties and thought since you get both of them regularly in gambit… I might be able to kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately I wound up finishing the Hive one on Tangled Shore, and the Scorn one in a Dreaming City Lost Sector. Still having a lot of fun but very much not taking anything seriously.

Back over in Final Fantasy XIV, like I have said a few times I have been purposefully avoiding the login queues by playing other games. However I think either over the next few days or over the weekend I am going to start fighting my way in again. I have some dungeons to run that I have unlocked but never done before, and I think my friend Grace also has them unlocked as well. I figure it might be good shenanigans to run around and do them together and then loop in anyone else in the free company who wants to go along as well given that we have tank and heals covered for easy queues. The above image is not a story spoiler but makes me exceptionally happy because so much of the moon is pulled straight out of my Final Fantasy IV nostalgia.

I did stumble across something pretty cool last night if you are looking for something to watch. There is a multi-part docuseries on YouTube about the origins of the Xbox and the various travails that the console went through during inception as well as various missteps. This is edited in the format of a Netflix multi-part documentary so that it almost feels like something created by No Clip. They even got Laura Bailey to do the narration for the series which makes it feel all the more legit. While watching it you almost forget for a moment how brilliant this piece of marketing actually is. It is absolutely evangelism for the Xbox brand and paints it in the light of being this scrappy “by gamers for gamers” rebel. I was not an Xbox gamer, I jumped straight from Dreamcast to playing PC MMORPGs with a brief revisit in PlayStation 2 land. I do remember my friends getting super into it however and my neighbor across the street being extremely into Halo.

I am on part four right now of what is currently a six part series, and it is just self deprecating enough to feel fair. It would never do anything to paint Microsoft in a bad light, because it is produced from within the bowels of Redmond but it does let down the guard more than a few times in very strategic ways in order to feel like the behind the scenes story. Truth is I know a few people who worked on the original Xbox and this syncs up with some of the stories they had told me. I’ve actually seen one of those original metal Xboxes that they show off in the series in person. However never forget that this is absolutely brilliant marketing. I mean I just bought an Xbox Series X which means it is working, because Game Pass and XCloud really are phenomenal deals and my old school 90s VCR model Xbox One needed and upgrade.

Dawning Time

by

I have to admit I had completely forgotten about the Dawning Festival being a thing, or how generally satisfying it is. For those who have not experienced it, this is a weird festival where you shoot bad guys to collect materials… to make deeply questionable sounding cookies. You then hand those cookies into people in the tower and other destinations… for reward packages that include in them a bunch of Dawning specific weapons. It ends up forming this really enjoyable loop of “do some stuff”, “get some stuff”, and then ultimately “get big rewards”. For me who is currently grossly under-geared, it also serves as the impetus to actually be doing some grinding which helps to remedy that situation.

Given my present mental and emotional state, this all seems to fit right now. I know I should be fighting through the FFXIV queue and working on collecting some bookrocks, but that right now seems so cumbersome and instead I shoot some dudes for a candy like explosion of materials. It is about all I can really handle engagement wise at this very moment. I am in a very active clan, but I can’t really bring myself to engage much in that either. I know activities are happening on the regular but the emotional toll of losing Kenzie I am afraid has caused me to slip back into turtle mode. I will dig myself out at a later date but for now I am sorta trying to heal.

I am slowly working on a series of dawning quests, and for right now the only weapon that I have unlocked is the Glacioclasm. I am not the biggest fan of fusion rifles, largely because of the very small ammunition pool. At some point Bungie made a massive quality of life change and made all primary weapons have unlimited ammunition reserves. This means I can just run around effectively forever with “white ammo” weapons and just not care about ammunition at all. This means I am way the hell more likely to use double primary instead of a primary/secondary load-out. I did however use this to knock out a few bounties and the weapon is “fine” but probably not better than my Cartesian Coordinate.

The item I think most of us are seeking is a good role of the new Stasis element sword that was introduced with this event. Slowly but surely I am working my way through that quest and once completed I can purchase packages that give me an increased chance of getting more copies of it to drop. For the moment this all seems to be right down my alley and I am going with it. I’ve not abandoned FFXIV or even New World to be honest… though I am mostly in a holding pattern on the later to see if they pull their head out of their ass. With Final Fantasy XIV I am waiting for queues to die down to rational levels to where I can realistically choose to play the game and get in within thirty minutes instead of needing to play my entire day around it.

Bungie 30th Anniversary

by

Hey Friends, I have been struggling to attach to games this week… and honestly last week as well. Having finished Endwalker, I have been purposefully staying away from that game in my small way of trying to help with congestion so that more people can get through it. I get that I am just one person… but if more people took a step away for a bit, more folks would get to experience that great expansion. In the meantime I have been floundering a bit to find new purpose and booted up Destiny 2 on a whim… and it more or less stuck. I think mostly my mental and emotional speed right now is “mindless shootymans game”. It doesn’t hurt that there is a 30th Anniversary event going on in game and with it a bunch of interesting drops.

The best of these for my purposes is the BXR-55 Battler which is essentially a pulse rifle patterned off of the Battle Rifle from Halo. The default load out has it burst firing, but I have slotted in a mod that shifts mine to full auto making it a pretty great primary weapon. What I really dig about this weapon is the accuracy and range and the ability to hip-fire it reliably. Which effectively gives me a single weapon that can be scoped for something akin to a scout rifle for picking off targets at range, or hip-fired to give me something that feels like an auto rifle. I have this sneaking feeling that this is going to eventually get nerfed because it seems to be dominating the meta a the moment.

There are a whole slew of other weapons that are in honor of past Bungie games. If you were more of a Covenant person, you can pick up the Retraced Path which is sort of themed after the Carbine. It also serves as the first legendary quality trace rifle, with the rest of weapons in that category taking up your exotic slot. If the Energy Sword was more your jam, the game has two “half” energy swords that make me wonder if we are eventually going to get an exotic quest to join them into the true Energy Sword equivalent. I never played Marathon because I did not have access to a Mac, but apparently the shotgun that drops is in honor of that game. There is a grenade launcher dropping and I have no clue what it is themed after other than it bears resemblance to the Mountain Top.

The new game mode that drops most of these weapons is called Dares of Eternity and is a weird “game show” hosted by the Starhorse and Xur. Essentially you spin a wheel and this chooses what type of enemy you face during that round. You battle your way through multiple rounds and then face a classic Destiny 1 boss at the very end. There is a scoring system which allows you to complete bounties for the Starhorse, and a more general series of bounties that you can complete for Xur. You win at least one key per round and can also get Strange Coins from doing other activities during the Anniversary Event that you can turn in for more keys or other items. If you unlock enough caches and save up enough keys you can earn things like ships or sparrows as well as I believe a full armor set.

All in all it is some “big dumb fun”, and I think that is what my brain needs right now. There is a new DLC dungeon that I would love to get a group for at some point so I can pick up Gjallarhorn which is tied to completing it. Additionally there is a quest chain that unlocks an exotic sidearm that is based off of the pistol from Halo that I would like to get as well. Mostly I am spending my time doing Dares of Eternity over and over, but I have started knocking out some weekly rewards to try and get my light level up there. It is still not the best system in the world, but after New World I know that it could be so much worse.

Bleeding Earthquakes

by

Good Morning Friends! I had a very rough weekend for a few different reasons. The main reason however is that Friday night my wife and I had the Pfizer COVID booster along with the Flu Shot. This was maybe not the best idea because I had all sorts of symptoms over the weekend and had no real clue if it was the Booster or the Flu shot, but absolutely know that both arms were sore as hell Saturday morning. We survived and I am feeling much better so far this morning, but yesterday was a bit rough. Saturday was largely “splitting headache” and everything aches territory, and yesterday was run a fever and feel like I am going to die for a couple of hours in the afternoon then things start to fade away. Interesting thing we heard about the booster is that the efficacy should only take about 48 hours to kick in, which means we should be good for any Thanksgiving shenanigans.

The above screenshot is from Final Fantasy XIV as I dipped in briefly over the weekend to try and start to get back into the swing of logging in again. I managed to finish the Doman Enclave and with it comes a really cool ceremony that reminds me of the similar ceremony from Horizon Zero Dawn. I need to find my footing in the coming weeks in FFXIV again, and spend a good deal of time cleaning out my retainers because a large part of the whole “level everything to 80” campaign was so that I could safely chuck a bunch of unneeded gear into the bin… or more likely feed it to the Grand Company vendor for seals. The other part of this that needs to happen is to cobble together some outfits for my retainers themselves as a number of them are quite high up in various professions.

Most of my weekend was spent playing Outriders and the New Horizon patch is in fact good. I got together with Waren a bit on Saturday and ran through some expeditions where he carried me an extreme amount. The rest of the weekend was spent trying to grind up the resources in order to catch up my gear to where maybe I won’t be quite the “backpack” that I ended up being. I also spent some time exploring various builds, and ended up changing my spec up completely to one focused on earthquake and bleed effects. I’ve never NOT been the center tree of Devastator so it is interesting how little it makes a difference survival wise dropping to what I thought was one of the “DPS” trees.

For those who might be curious here is my current talent choices and skills being used composited together into a single screenshot. Here is a note for developers where build diversity is a key part of your game. Maybe you should create a single screen that someone can take a screenshot of that includes all of the relevant choices made for that specific character. It would be nice if it had a rundown of the various bonuses being applied from gear along with the skills chosen and relevant talent choices. I’ve needed to fake out one of these screens so many times while playing different games when I wanted to share my “build” with my readers. I can’t think that I am the only one who wants to do this thing and surely it would be simple enough to create a screen that summarizes all of the various bits of data you already have access to.

I have also been spending a fair amount of time playing my “main alt” which is the Technomancer. Thing I have learned about Outriders at least, but I am wondering if it applies to all third person shooters… is that apparently I prefer playing a female character model because it takes up less space on the screen. The male character in outriders is kinda bulky, and is occluding a fair amount of the visual area… and honestly I sorta wish I could gender change my main to being something more svelte and taking up less space. I remember having this issue with the Norn in GW2, and why I ended up going with the much smaller Human when I rolled a main after beta. I need to pay more attention to this in the future and see if this is something that carries over to other games.

Lastly I am not going to talk about it much this morning, but I left a heated review of New World on Steam over the weekend. I’ve uninstalled the game and I am not really ready to talk about it in any manner that does not come across as angry gibberish yet. If you are super curious I littered my Twitter account with random threads throughout the weekend. Basically Patch 1.1 killed my desire to play the game with its changes to the end game camps, and after growing steadily more agitated Saturday night while recording the podcast… I decided it was better for my mental health to uninstall and force myself to walk away from it. The only game that I have ever loved this much and see managed this poorly is World of Warcraft, and I think that is probably why my posts on that game often come across as angry drivel as well. Key difference being that anger was spread out over a decades worth of decisions… and this was all crammed in a two month period making it seem so much worse.