There is a region roughly 30 degrees north or south of the equator that is characterized by very calm winds and areas of high pressure. Historically this is a region that ships would effectively get “stuck” in for weeks at a time as they drift along listlessly without strong winds. According to legend in order to conserve the rapidly depleting supply of fresh water, some ships would throw the horses overboard. As a result they developed the nickname of the “Horse Latitudes”. There are however multiple competing theories about the origin if you are so inclined, but it is one of those terms from history class that held with me throughout the years.
Right now as I have felt so many times… I am feeling stuck. I feel like I am in this strange valley in between passions and just sort of languishing wildly there. I have the desire to play Genshin Impact, but I have ventured into a realm where I can only play so much at a given time without it feeling largely pointless. I figure at this rate I will probably be AR40 in about two weeks, when I will be even further in the hole on trying to get my characters leveled, ascended, talented and geared… when it doesn’t feel like I have made a significant dent since dinging AR35. As I have talked about before, everything hinges upon Resin and I don’t have the desire to spend the roughly $12 a day in primagems to ensure that I can get the maximum number of refreshes done.
So I find myself logging in every day, completing the daily quests… spending the resin I have available to me and then claiming the various daily login bonus rewards. I am now doing this on two different accounts and still finding myself lacking for something that feels meaningful. I could grind super hard on the second account but I figure that way lies burn out. Everything I am doing on that account already has an extreme “been there and done that” feeling to it, so I am trying to limit my time over there to just knocking out the dailies and stockpiling wish material.
Then there is World of Warcraft and the unknown release date of the Shadowlands expansion. If they came out tomorrow and said, that they were not launching until January, I feel like I could happily move on with my life. However the not knowing when and how it is going to launch feels awful. I’m currently running the Headless Horseman every day in an attempt to get the mount, but I found out yesterday that it only works on characters that are capable of getting the purple loot rewards. That limits me down considerably in the number of daily iterations. I should in theory be working on finishing out my rogue but I am just fundamentally not feeling it.
I created a new character on a new server with the theory of wanting to see the Exiles Reach player experience. However here he sits having never logged it in and started. I am just finding myself having a hard to getting started on anything in World of Warcraft right now, because it all feels lacking in some way. I guess what I want is something with the feel of Genshin Impact but the longevity of a World of Warcraft and the wealth of content to complete. I know someone in the comments is going to suggest Guild Wars 2, and god how I have tried to care about that game over the years. Whatever it is doing is not what I am wanting, even though I do clearly see some of the parallels to Genshin and the way the world is designed in both games.
I could in theory return to Destiny 2 and see if I can slide back into the rhythm of that game. The problem however is that I just feel so woefully behind in the seasonal construct. The fact that there has been so much revolving content that comes and then goes and that fact that we are losing several planets when Beyond Light lands in early November sorta paralyzes me. I have a bunch of Exotic quests that require various things, but I would need a team to do them… and I realize I can make that happen as well but that also in itself feels like a large outlay of energy.
In theory I should follow the lead of my friend Warenwolf and head back over to TQMB, but I am not even sure they would still take me back. I left at the PC launch of Destiny 2 because my long time friend group felt more comfortable if we started our own thing. However most of them bounced and I was never really quite capable of rekindling it once they were gone. My own huge lapses in play time didn’t help either, leaving us with effectively a dead clan. Having a vibrant community would probably help especially if it meant there were various drop in events that I could sign up for. That said I also know how much is going to happen in November as a whole and in theory I have a new console waiting on me as well.
That brings us to the next challenge. I have things that I wouldn’t mind getting back into on the PlayStation, but I am largely in a holding pattern until the launch of the PS5. I am not sure how much further I want to get into various games not knowing with 100% certainty that my save progress is going to carry over cleanly. Anyways I realize this is probably an annoying post to read but sometimes I write for me and my own mental housekeeping. I feel stuck and I need to figure out for myself how to get un-stuck.
Good Morning Folks! For anyone who has tuned in more recently during the “Genshin Boom” as I am calling it, there is this thing that I like to do semi-monthly where I review the games I have been playing and talk about them a bit. This also serves as a reminder for me to update the regularly playing widget in the sidebar of this blog. Even more than this it is also a time for me to finally admit that a romance with a game is over and send it off on its way, while also talking about the new things that excite me. I actually legitimately did one of these in September so maybe this is the beginning of it actually returning to being something I do each month.
Essentially I like to divide the games up into a few categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
To Those Remaining
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
I am a sucker for this game. I am not playing an awful lot of it right now because we are in the doldrums between finishing one season and starting a new one. However the next season is right around the corner and it should be a very interesting one. During the season the Kanai’s Cube is expanding to four slots with the fourth being completely open to what you want to stick in it. I am assuming that most builds are going to go with some sort of double weapon buffs, but it should be super interesting. Given how packed that November is going to likely be gaming wise, it probably means I will be Demon Huntering it up given that tends to be the fastest route forward.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS4 / PS5
I am one of the lucky few that managed to snag a PlayStation 5 preorder, or at least hope that I was successful. I am not playing this game a lot, largely because I am waiting for the improved visuals of playing it through a PS5… but I am occasionally popping it open and wandering feudal japan from time to time. Glorious game and I look forward to focusing on some more at the tail end of this year.
Hades – PC and Switch
This game is now officially out and you should probably be playing it. I’ve shifted things up a bit and I am now playing a lot more of this on the Switch from bed than I am on the PC. I am looking forward to cross save being implemented because while I am not super progress on either platform I would love to just have one that I am focused on period. This is a really great game and I am constantly in awe of how well Supergiant makes games.
New World – PC
I am not actively playing this game but lord I wish I was. I keep hearing rumors about new phases of testing starting up soon, and I am down for this. I had a blast in August and September playing the last extended phase of testing, and the phase prior to that one. I am super on board with this game whenever it actually launches and I would love for if the next phase included a friend code… or if they just rolled into Open Beta soon. I cannot fully conceptualize why I enjoyed this game so much, but I am wanting to get in and share it with some friends. I have this sneaking suspicion that the AggroChat group will be drawn towards Team purple, even though I myself tend to gravitate towards Green. I will make the sacrifice of course for them however, but it is definitely an experience where you want everyone on the same team.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch
I started this last time as a general catch all category for poking around with emulation and my Retro Freak console. I’m not really dug in deeply into any games other than maybe the current play through of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest that I have going on the switch. I also picked up a mega pack of Sega Genesis games recently when it was on sale for the Switch and I’ve been playing quite a bit of classic Streets of Rage 2. I’ve yet to really go spelunking into the closet, but given that I am going to have to rearrange my set up to make room for the PlayStation 5… I have a feeling that I might be doing this sooner rather than later. I need to devote a weekend to organizing and hooking up my office for playing this sort of nonsense. I still want to dig out the NeoGeo CD and see if I can get it running on HDMI.
World of Warcraft – Retail / Beta
Shadowlands has been delayed, but we should have the pre-patch event starting next Tuesday. I am hoping to spend some time this weekend maybe finishing leveling my rogue, but other projects have stolen my attention. Additionally we should have the beginning of the Halloween event soon, and you can damned well bet I am going to be spending each day running it on each of my available characters because I really want that damned mount finally. I mean it is highly likely that I won’t get it… but I am going to at least make a good effort this year given that I actually am enjoying the game still. November is likely going to be heavy shadowlands time for me so this absolutely retains its spot.
To The New and Returning
Genshin Impact – PC / Android
If you have been reading this blog at all this month and the tail end of the last month you will know that I am completely obsessed with Genshin Impact. This is being called “Breath of the Waifu” by many a person online, but I am not even sure if that covers it. I am absolutely not playing it for the Waifu or Husbando, but instead because it is this insanely good action RPG that sort of came from out of nowhere. It is this expert blending of Breath of the Wild, Trials of Mana, Modern Dragon Quest games, Open World Exploration and the addictive as hell Gacha mechanics of Dragalia Lost. I am still shocked at just how damned good this game is for as free as it legitimately is. Sure I have spent money on the game but I also didn’t feel like I had to. If you are not playing this you should be, and probably on the PC/Mobile since they cross save and the PS4 is locked to only that platform. That said there is cross play between all of the platforms regardless, I just like the freedom of being able to farm materials from bed on my phone or tablet and also play primarily on my PC.
To Those Departing
Avengers – PC
Oh Avengers… its not me… its you. I feel like this game probably needed another year to mature and develop enough interesting combat to really be the sort of game that it was trying to be. This is the Anthem of 2020, a game with a lot of promise but also a game that felt pointless after awhile as I chased rewards that didn’t really matter. The difference being that the moment to moment gameplay was so much more enjoyable in Anthem. Avengers needs significant tweaks in its combat system to make it feel more enjoyable in the moment to moment gameplay. I leveled and farmed up a full set of yellow gear for Captain America, leveled up Thor, and then realized while I was leveling Ms Marvel that I didn’t exactly know why I was doing it and logged out never to log in again.
I rarely do two pictures for a single game, but here we are breaking that rule. This is a snipping from Steam DB for the Avengers game, and notice that its peak concurrency was at launch… and only ever hit just over 31,000 players. The few times I attempted to match up with other players, the queues were too long and I eventually gave up and went back to soloing content. The storyline for this game was great and I made me fall in love with the character of Ms Marvel, and since then I have been pouring through her comics through Marvel Unlimited and having a grand ole time. The game however just becomes repetitive when you realize there are six maps in the entire game and everything is carved out as chunks of those as they send you on the same handful of mission types with semi-randomized objectives. Maybe I will revisit in a year or so and see if the game has improved.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
I still don’t know why this game and I struggle to get along. There is so much about it that I adore, but at the same time I feel absolutely no desire to actually log in and play it. I left it on the list last time, but to be honest I don’t think I logged in at all during September. With everything on the horizon game wise with the launch of the PS5 and World of Warcraft Shadowlands… I don’t expect to probably play it for the rest of this calendar year. At some point I will return and gobble up a few patches worth of story content, but I am already behind in that department. I love Lalabel, and I will come back to visit him at some point in the future but for now we are admitting to ourselves that the game just isn’t going to be played in the near future.
Ships Passing in the Night
The Division 2 – PC
I gotta admit I teetered back and forth between putting this on the new and returning list. I had a really fun week/weekend hanging out and playing this game and I could see myself returning to it on a more permanent basis. That said… there is just so damned much stuff on my radar right now so I am going to put it in this category for the moment. If it becomes more… then it can trickle upwards on the list. The game has either massively improved since its launch, or I never really gave it enough of a chance because I became enthralled with Anthem. Either case… I am compelled to spend some more time here at some point.
Swords ‘n Magic and Stuff – PC
This charming game is an Early Access title that Tam stumbled onto and I have poked my head into a few times. Not really actively playing it, but it is something I am definitely going to be watching. They are doing active development on it and I am hoping some rounds of combat balance are in the works. if you want more detail you can check out my write up from a few weeks back.
Summary
There really wasn’t a ton of movement, but that is usually the case when I actually manage to do these on a monthly basis. Looming on the horizon is the launch of the PlayStation 5, World of Warcraft Shadowlands, and Cyberpunk 2077 which are all going to steal some of my time. Past hat I am really not sure what the tail end of this year is going to lead to. Time is moving so damned fast in part because every day is effectively the same as I rarely leave the house. I can’t believe we area already knee deep in October when mentally it still feels like it is maybe April. 2020 is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” I think for me, and while I have stayed busy… it all just sorta flows together.
What are you “regularly playing”? Drop me a line below.
A game I have not talked about in a really long time is The Division, or at least in the case of today The Division 2. For the longest time I have not known why I actually bounced off of this game so hard. It came out, I was enjoying myself and then in my faulty memory I just suddenly was not playing it anymore. Turns out what ACTUALLY happened is this game launched fifteen days ahead of Anthem. Anthem was a game that I had been clamoring to get my hands on and I ultimately threw myself into it entirely… for as long as that lasted. Quietly however in the background Division 2 was just being a good game, patiently waiting for me to notice it.
Ultimately I can thank Scarybooster for mentioning the game. The other night I was talking about being disillusioned with Avengers and not certain what I should be playing instead and he threw out Division 2. It turned out that I still even had the game installed, and at some point picked up the Warlords of New York expansion on sale thinking I would make a return. I found it odd just how easy it was to slide back into the game. I had some significant issues with the first game that I have never really been able to put my finger on. The moment to moment gameplay did not feel near as fun as it does in Division 2, and I am guessing maybe it is just because I feel like I have a significantly stronger solo kit in the form of a turret and a healing drone.
Additionally I feel significantly more sturdy than I did in Division, and that is combined with the fact that the individual encounters feel less bullet spongey. Whatever the case and whatever balance patches that have been applied, the state of the game at this very moment feels exceptionally good to be playing. I am not sure if I am just in a different place mentally, and maybe in a better mindset to approach combat tactically. It could be any number of factors adding up to the game clicking at this very moment in time. Whatever the case I am enjoying myself and mainly enjoying the moment to moment play of roaming the streets and helping people.
I think part of it as well is the tonal shift between the first and second game. There were a lot of moments in the first game where you were left wondering.. Are we the baddies? So much suffering was caused by Division agents and it did not help that most of your interactions on the streets were either shooting someone or watching civilians run away screaming at the sight of you. Now the game has shifted and after the fall of society a number of communities have sprung up, and you spend a pretty good amount of time helping these groups out. Little things like taking back an outpost from some hostile faction, then clears the way for the folks to return there safely. This then triggers caravans to move between settlements and these outposts and slowly converts a neighborhood to being mostly friendly folks trying to live their lives in the apocalypse, giving you even more opportunities for casual assistance.
The other thing that I dig is that I am finding it significantly easier to stay with a loadout that I actually enjoy. When I came back the other day I think I was level 16 and have since progressed to 23 with 30 being the initial level cap, and then New York taking it the rest of the way to 40. My gear of choice is a semi automatic rifle and a shotgun. I tend to spec the rifle to high stability, which allows me to use it long range to do some sniping, but the high rate of fire allows me to chew things down as they are getting closer. If someone absolutely runs up on me I can swap to the shotgun and drop them pretty quickly. I rarely if ever use the pistol, and it is mostly there as a last ditch “I ran out of ammo” option which seems to occur significantly less in this game.
My engagements tend to follow a pattern, where I will survey the room and look for a perch to set my turret up on an elevated position that can hit most of the targets. Then it provides suppression fire while I pick off the individual targets. If anyone clusters within range I throw a grenade, but slowly but surely I can chew down the initial wave until the boss and mini boss start to arrive. At which point I will pop my healing drone and hope for the best. I like that I can proactively destroy my drone and turret and I tend to wait out the timer while I search an area for anything worth looting, before ultimately triggering the next event. Division 2 is pretty good about giving you pauses in the action where you can wait things out if you so choose, and I appreciate this greatly.
You would think that it would not be enjoyable to play a game about the fall of society due to a biological agent… when we are effectively living through the fall of society due to a pandemic, but it weirdly works for me. Like I said above, so much of I think why it works so nicely is the change in tone. Division 1 was bleak and so much of my actions felt like the dying gasps of an old regime. Sure there is some of that in Division 2, but there is significantly more of the content that feels like I am actually helping folks out. I think that is why I enjoy roaming the streets so much because you are constantly coming across a caravan that needs assistance or saving some hostages from one of the armed groups. Those little moments make me feel far more like a wild west sheriff than a clandestine paramilitary operative.
Yesterday after making my blog post there was an extended back and forth that took place on twitter between me and my friend Pete. When I wrote the post yesterday, I largely considered it to be a positive review of Avengers. However Pete latched onto the fact that I said from the start that this was not a “must buy” game. I feel like I need to delve into that statement a bit further, because one of the things that you have to take into account is that I poke my head into a lot of new games. On a pretty regular basis I will have friends ask me, if this is “the one” aka the game that is going to unite the tribes for an extended period of time.
I have disposable income that I can use to purchase games without really impacting my quality of life. That is not the case for a lot of my friends and there are many folks who can’t afford to pick up a game on the day it is released, or in this case the day that the pre-release happened. It may be two or three pay periods before there is enough free cash to be able to purchase a game. So often when that mythical date finally comes around that someone can buy their way into an experience… that the zeitgeist has already moved on past it. So in the case of Avengers, I do not think this game is going to be something that gains permanent traction, at least not without a good deal of content being released.
I have no clue what the case is on consoles, but at least right at this moment it does not have great traction on Steam. The all time peak was 4 days ago when the game had just over 31k active users. The 24 hour peak was 19,602 so a fall off in concurrency of 37% since launch and the game is effectively nine days old. I’ve not played multiplayer, as I am largely focused on the core single player gameplay loop with bots, but based on the experiences of friends it seems that maybe everyone is doing this thing? The queue times are rough, so unless you are bringing your own team with you, fast groups are not a thing that is going to happen.
All of these things are why I am saying that if you are looking for the next big MMO, then this probably isn’t going to be it. That does not discount the fact that I think the main story is extremely good and that I am still enjoying myself. Honestly based on the conversation with Pete it comes down to a difference in perspectives. I tend to latch super hard onto a single game and play the shit out of it until I reach a point where I disengage because I ran out of content. I’ve already begun to encounter the frayed edges of that now, because as of last night I have collected what is effectively an end game set of gear. I will likely jump around to some other characters in the coming days, but I am not sure how much alting I am going to be down for given that I have clear favorites and then heroes that I cannot stand playing as like Iron Man.
As I talked about yesterday, the highest gear that drops is 130 power level. After that you can raise that gear 10 points if it is epic or legendary, and the Major artifact will add another base 10 points to your power rating. So if I pour a copious amount of materials into the full legendary armor set and then my two minor artifacts and grind out the rest of my Major artifact I will be at 150 the gear cap. This will of course take a really long time, and will be nowhere as enjoyable as actually getting things to drop. However I have effectively reached a point where Captain America is “done for now”, allowing me to shift over to other characters and try bringing them up to level 50.
I thought I would share my farming run with you, because I am absolutely abusing the system in how to get drops. There is a mission called Stark Realities that has a few side objectives that are actually more valuable than completing the mission itself. Avengers uses a check point system, and unless you have completed any objectives you can exit out of the mission and start it again to keep farming the side objectives over and over. Sure this is degenerate gameplay, but it also was a fast way for me to raise my gear level. Lets just say that I did this for science, and for the ability to write about it.
There are three areas on the map that have things that you might be interested in, but after having run this several times I feel that it is best to focus on two specific side objectives for the maximum amount of benefit. The first is the hidden shield vault, and when you drop into the mission you are going to turn left and follow the zone wall around until a tracker appears under the objective on the left hand side of the screen. You could of course play hotter or colder until you find the switch on your own, but it will always be located in the same place so run towards that single solitary tree in near the center of this clearing.
Once you hit the switch the shield bunker will open and inside are two chests, one of which will contain a guaranteed piece of gear and a guaranteed minor artifact. I’ve never seen a legendary minor artifact, so it seems like the best possible thing you can get here is an epic which I have. After this you are going to follow the icon to the mission objective. This route is going to take you in from the side and will end up causing you to miss a bunch of packs, which in this case is a good thing given that you can effectively run all the way to the shield bunker without killing anything.
When you get to the objective a pack of 5 elites are going to spawn in around a bunker. You are going to completely ignore this pack and try and avoid them while going through the bunker gate and then hanging a hard left to go down the path shown in the above image. This will eventually dead end into an area with two side objectives. The first is going to be a single elite that has a guaranteed item drop, and the second is a chest that appears behind one of those destructible walls. Since I have been playing Cap, and there is seemingly no way to break down those walls I have just been farming the mob that has a guaranteed drop.
Once you take out that Elite, it will drop something and will be either a blue, purple or yellow. Once you wrap the pack up you can hit escape and choose the “Return to Quinjet” option allowing you to reset the mission and start it up again. When I was at my peak efficiency, this run was maybe taking two minutes to complete, and technically you can bail as soon as the elite drops. I however preferred mopping up the pack that spawns in with it because I have actually seen a significant number of bonus drops that way. Sure it is repetitive, but it is the sort of activity that is perfect to do while watching something on Netflix because it requires very little focus.
As for leveling other characters… sadly the most efficient way of doing so seems to be repeating the Harm missions over and over. Everything in the game gives you experience, even these tutorial missions. It seems like experience gain is not impacted at all by the difficulty that you are attempting, so that means your best bet is to queue up for anything with a large volume of mob encounters on the lowest possible difficult. You won’t get any gear drops in the Harm challenges, but you will get one to two levels per round until you get fairly high in level. At this point you can bump things up to Harm IV or Harm V which reward more experience, not because of the difficulty but because they spawn in a lot of mini boss type encounters.
I attempted to do some of this on Thor yesterday, and while I was perfectly fine grinding for loot… grinding for experience bored the shit out of me. So I figure I will probably go back to running missions because at least in that way I am getting some gear drops as I continue the leveling process and have a chance of maybe getting wardrobe unlocks through the rare and epic pattern drops. I’ve never seen a legendary pattern drop, but for all I know that might be a thing that exists in super rarity out in the wild. Grinding the levels also gives me a more reliable source of item materials which then can be converted into power level on Cap. For me at least that seems to be the best option, but for sheer speed… those Harm missions cannot be beat.
