Looter Shooter

Waiting for Aloy

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Good morning friends. I think for the moment I am going to be bouncing my way out of Wolfenstein: Youngblood. It isn’t a bad game but it is not the game I wanted it to be. The other Wolfenstein titles from Machine Games were very much narrative driven, and this is more of a hub based choose your own adventure title. I mean on some level it makes sense given that this was created by Arkane and I am guessing more specifically some of the folks that worked on Dishonored II given how much the setting FEELS like that did. I would not have enjoyed that game anywhere near as much however if it did not have the powerful driving storyline, and so far Youngblood has just not grabbed me. I really think this game was designed for two people and playing it solo is not really giving it a full chance. I might return to it at some point in the future but for now I am bailing.

In truth pretty much everything that I do this week is just biding time before I can play Horizon Forbidden West. I am trying my best not to hype it up in my mind, but I have to say I miss the adventures of Aloy. She is easily among my favorite video game characters and I am looking forward to learning more about the world she lives in. If you never played Horizon Zero Dawn, absolutely stop whatever you are doing now and go play it. I played it initially on the PS4 and then later again on the PC when it released there and I loved both experiences. I have the game installed and readyish to go… given that I am certain there will be a zero day patch required to actually play it. I freaking love digital distribution. I grew up in a tiny town without access to anything other than a Walmart… and eventually even that closed up its doors. Digital distribution would have been a life saver… pending of course I could have actually gotten a reasonable internet connection. My parents got the fastest that they had available recently… and it is 10 mb down and 5 mb up… which is a far cry from my 300 mb down 50 mb up.

One of the games that I have been spending time with is something that my friend Grace found. I thought I had tried almost all of the diablo-likes on Steam, but apparently missed one. Chronicon does not look like much, because it absolutely suffers from the feeling of being “programmer art”, but where it does shine is in its systems and game-play. It has been a long time since I have seen a game nail what it feels to play a proper Diablo style game as much as this one has. On some level I would love to see this team and the Wolcen team join forces, because one game is gorgeous and the other game understands the systems of what is required to make an ARPG feel fluid and enjoyable. I really wish this game were available for the Switch. In theory since this is a GameMaker Studio game, it might be possible at some point for them to port the game.

I spent the majority of last night however playing some Ghost of Tsushima… getting hassled by my Uncle about my recent behavior. It’s not a phase dammit! I love this game but the fact it is on the console has lead me to play it far less than it deserves. My hope is with me dragging my consoles downstairs, that it might actually get my attention considerably more often. I’ve been working remotely for going on three years, and as a result when the work day is over the last thing I want to be is up in my office… which I largely associate with work. Since my consoles were stranded up there, it meant also that I never really played them. Last night I chilled on the sofa with a cat in my lap and killed some bad men… and apparently I am a source of disappointment for picking and choosing my battles. You’re not even my real dad!

I actually moved the story along a bit. For awhile I had been booting up the game, discovering a few points of interest and then logging right back out. I finished the last two story bits leading up to the storming of Kaneda castle. I am terribly disappointed that there were zero futuristic motor bikes available for me to ride. I’ve opened up the world a bit and met a really cool warrior monk that I want to be friends with. He has seen some shit but also seems to mostly remain a genuinely good person in spite of everything. I have to say I feel like this game is going to make me choose between Fake Dad and Murder Mommy at some point, and I am probably going to choose Murder Mommy. She just genuinely seems cooler and I genuinely want to help her people and get her and her brother off the island.

It is such a gorgeous game, but I have to say because I have old eyes… I wish the text was a bit bigger. I went into accessibility settings and turned on the zoom functionality on the console so if there is absolutely something I need to read but can’t, I can at least use my old man magnifying lens. This cracked me up because I remember growing up, my grandfather always had a magnifying lens out on the kitchen table… and now I completely understand why. I remember my friend Nimgimli complaining about consoles and text sizes and now that I am actually playing a console like most normal humans do… I absolutely feel these feels. I am sorry Tsushima but your salvation will ultimately have to wait when Friday rolls around because it will then be time to fight robot dinosaurs once again.

Man on The Moon

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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

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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

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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.