MMORPG

FFXIV Yo-Kai Event

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Last night we continued with our adventures in Schitt’s Creek, and instead of working on the Shaman in World of Warcraft I decided to spend some time in Final Fantasy XIV. Right now there is an event going on that crosses over with Yo-Kai Watch, a thing that I know next to nothing about other than the fact that the toys did not sell here at all and are available in mos Dollar Tree stores. I’ve always sort of assumed it was Pokemon but instead creepy ghosts? This is not the first time we have had this event in XIV, but the last time around I was apparently not paying any attention.

Participation is really simple, which is in part why I am interested in joining in the nonsense this time around. Essentially you complete a quest, get a wrist item and then doing FATEs while wearing that wrist item allows you to collect Yo-Kai medals. You can turn these in for very unique minions or weapons that are seemingly themed after the series. I apparently accepted the quest last time around but never turned in it… which lead to a lot of confusion when I first logged in trying to figure out how to get started. One thing of note… the event specifically calls out certain areas of the game with eligible fates.

  • La Noscea
  • The Black Shroud
  • Thanalan
  • All Heavensward Zones
  • All Stormblood Zones

Essentially it seems like they specifically ruled out Mor Dhona and Coerthas Central Highlands which I guess makes sense given that those specifically are common FATE grind spots.

I spent a chunk of last night low key doing FATEs in The Fringes, largely because it was easy to zone out from Rhalgr’s Reach. However it seems like a lot of people had that idea and I even bumped into my good friend Jess while leveling out there as well. I collected enough medals for seven of the seventeen pets and got all of level 73 on my Red Mage while running around. I am not sure how far I will make it but it does provide an interesting reason to be in Final Fantasy XIV, which had been something I was admittedly lacking. I’ve not done any of the 5.3 story, so in theory at some point over the weekend that will happen as well.

Miss Kaiyoko Star created an excellent infographic outlining what zones need to be done for the various weapons. It seems like the numbers of things needed has been reduced from the last time the event was run. I remember there being an escalating scale that took awhile to cap out, but now it just seems like you get 1 cheap minion and 1 cheap weapon and then all addition after that are at a fixed cost. So if my math is correct 49 medals for all of the minions and then significantly more complicated situation for the weapons given that they require you to do FATEs in a specific zone with a specific minion. However that all adds up to 165 legendary medals.

If nothing else it does serve as a good opportunity to level some more jobs. Right now I have Warrior, Samurai and Bard at the level cap and I’ve most recently been working on the Red Mage. About and hour and a half of running FATEs earned me a level, and I have a feeling that is probably going to be about the case going forward. FATEs are not a fast way to get levels, but they are a reliable and consistent one… and require just about the right level of interaction for sitting and watching something on Netflix.

Netflix and Lava Burst

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Last night I took a break from attempting to halt the Mongol invasion of Japan and returned to Azeroth. I have three characters horde side that are not 120. Weirdly they also represent most of my allied races characters aka my Maghar Shaman, Void Elf Priest and Vulpera Rogue. I made a massive push and leveled so many things to 120 in such a short period of time, that I am now sorta keeping these as a low key side project for when I need equally low key levels of activity. World of Warcraft is comfort gaming that I can more or less play in my sleep at this point, and sometimes you just need that in your life.

I am however getting somewhat tired of Borean Tundra. It is significantly more efficient than Howling Fjord but it also lags a bit and has a few quests that I absolutely cannot stand. I am standing where I am because I was lured over to complete a quest without reading what it was. I abandoned the quest where you load a mule up with wreckage and then try and get it back to base without losing anything. I just cannot be bothered by that nonsense and as a result I think I am probably going to be seeking out a command board to get the starter quest to go elsewhere in Northrend.

I am not a completionist at all and I will happily abandon quests left and right, especially when I am playing an alt. I’m 76 currently and I believe the elevator stops when I get to 80 and will ultimately transition over into I believe a choice of Pandaria or Cataclysm. As frustratingly gated as it is, I do enjoy the content in Pandaria significantly more as it has aged. In fact my overall opinion of that expansion has also increased significantly with age. Strangely Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King on the other hand are content blocks that I don’t look forward to in quite the way that I once did because the game has evolved since those days as has my attention span.

In my normal tradition of discovering things years too late… my wife and I have recently started a watch through of Schitt’s Creek. I had heard of the show but never got around to checking it out, and quite honestly I had no clue what the Pop Channel was. It turns out it is the channel formerly known as Prevue and later the TV Guide Channel… which is peak levels of irony since I used to work for the parent company during the early 2000s. I spent New Years of 2000 on the roof of the corporate headquarters since we had an all hands order as we prepared for all of the post apocalyptic things that were supposed to be happening.

It is a good show but I am not entirely certain if I can pinpoint WHY I find it so funny. I think on one hand it is that Schitt’s Creek is not dissimilar to the tiny towns that both my wife and I grew up in. I know the people that are represented on screen and serve as a foil to the Rose family. David and Stevie are without a doubt my favorite characters, but I do admit it was a little weird seeing Chris Elliot playing Roland without devolving to full Cabin Boy levels of nonsense. I think the series does a good job of creating humorous fish out of water situations without going all the way in painting the local folk as idiots. I ran like hell as soon as I could get out of my small town upbringing, and am still in many ways running from it… but that said I still have certain nostalgia for the cast of non-sequitur characters that small towns create.

As of last night we are about halfway through season three and I am hoping by the time we get there the sixth and final season will be available on netflix.

PlayStation Show and Shaman to 60

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So yesterday I made a post that is a bit out of the ordinary for my blog. Largely it was a thought experiment about whether or not we would actually get consoles this season. In a normal year I would take that both companies had announced a Holiday launch to be a done deal. However 2020 is the year when everything has been cancelled, sometimes rescheduled and often times cancelled again. We are not playing under normal circumstances and there are likely unforeseen supply chain issues that are being impacted by Covid-19. However regardless of that a Sony show happened yesterday and as they suggested there was no major PlayStation 5 news, but instead some discussion about things that had already been announced.

If you are curious about the entire show, then you can check out this link that should forward you right to the beginning of the broadcast. Of the things shown, I think Crash Bandicoot 4 was probably the most interesting to me. We have been in this time of reboots and re-imaginings, so I find it extremely interesting to get an official sequel to Crash Bandicoot: Warped from 1998. The gameplay looks to have evolved as well and I am pretty excited to get to play it. Additionally it appears that the game will be coming out for PlayStation 4 and won’t actually be a PS5 launch title. Availability to more players is always going to be a good thing, especially considering I think the PS5 will be in extremely short availability this year.

We also got to see more information about Godfall and while it still sorta looks like if Skyforge and Destiny had a kid, it appears there are also elements of Warframe factored in with your ability to find and unlock new “suits” with their own unique abilities. The designer giving the demo went out of his way to state that there would be no micro-transactions and that the game has all of its content on day one. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. I am hoping that means the game is something more akin to Diablo 3 in the way it grows and progresses, but even D3 released a Reaper of Souls expansion and a Necromancer DLC pack. The combat looks fun, so I will likely be checking this out on PC, because it doesn’t seem like the type of game I want to play on a console.

Other than watching the Sony show, I spent the majority of the night piddling around on the Shaman in World of Warcraft. I managed to ding 60 and say goodbye to the old world and move my way into Borean Tundra. I contemplated starting over in Howling Fjord because I like that zone significantly better, but the last character I ran over there seemed to level significantly more slowly. The quests are spread out and the hubs are less conducive to batching things up. I am still really enjoying the Elemental Shaman and up until this point I don’t feel squishy, which really helps the enjoyment of a caster.

All of that said… forward momentum on the Shaman is probably going to grind to a halt given that Horizon Zero Dawn complete edition releases on PC at some point this morning. I was able to log in and pre-load last night and I can see this more or less eating the rest of my free time. I played through the original game on PlayStation 4, but never really touched the DLC. My hope is that by replaying the experience of transitioning into the DLC will feel more seamless. I also think playing with a mouse and keyboard is going to make the bow combat feel significantly better. I’ve heard some weird issues with performance, so I am hoping that gets patched quickly. I’ve been running Death Stranding which uses the same engine so my hope is that I can at least get it to look as good as a PS4 Pro.

So… what does your weekend look like? Will you be dipping your toes into Horizon Zero Dawn? Drop me a line below with what you have planned.

Fire Soldiers and Elf Beards

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Death Stranding - Creepy Dudes Standing in Fire
Death Stranding – Creepy Dudes Standing in Fire

When in doubt folks, lead with the coolest screenshot that you have. This is one of those weekends when I spent a truly phenomenal amount of time playing a specific game… that I absolutely cannot talk about because reasons. I believe I clocked in around twenty hours playing the thing that I can’t talk about over the course of primarily Friday and Saturday. I look forward to seeing more of the thing that I can’t talk about seeing. Instead this morning you are going to get one of those general rundown type posts talking about where I am in various games.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands - Blood Elf Character Creator
World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Blood Elf Character Creator

I got into Shadowlands Beta out of the magnanimous nature of a friend of mine, so huge props to them for helping me out there. I’ve been piddling around over the last week and I am having a lot of fun. The most important thing to talk about however is the changes to the character creator. I can have a beard as a Blood Elf, which is phenomenal since that was not a thing you could really do well. The best you could do previously was a weak assed chinstrip. The undead models look amazing as well and are pretty much everything I have ever wanted in a rotting corpse. The big thing is it seems like they have expanded the options and decoupled them so whereas things used to be locked to specific sets of choices, but for example Tauren horn and hair and face are no longer combined in weird forced sets.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands - Intro Quest
World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Intro Quest

As far as the Story itself… I am getting DEEP Wrath of the Lich King vibes here and it is more than just the fact that the Ebon Blade are factoring significantly in everything we are doing right now. I am also greatly enjoying that there has been no faction based bullshit yet, and it is all a big team pulling together to save Azeroth sort of feel. The intro quest reminds me of the storming of the Dark Portal in Warlords, if that even were less on-rails. It has a “we did a thing and we were absolutely not prepared for the ramifications” type feeling to it. As far as the zone content, it reminds me of the best parts of Legion and Burning Crusade in that we are exploring a world that works NOTHING like the one we came from and it is a “stranger in a strange land” sort of feel.

Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning Server
Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning Server

In more of my usual nonsense, I for some reason decided to reinstall Return of Reckoning which is a thing. I’ve not really done much but I did create a Dwarven Iron Breaker which was my class of choice back when this thing was a live game. I have to say that the quest advisement is not super amazing. Sure this was the first game to do the whole highlight an area of the map, which was cool… but I still cannot for the life of me find a damned book that is supposed to be on a nearby bench. I got in for a bit, played through a few quests and then got frustrated. Hopefully when I am in a different mindset I can pop back in and play some more.

Sega Saturn Bluetooth Retro Controller
Sega Saturn Bluetooth Retro Controller

In other random news I have settled on what I feel is the perfect controller for my Retro Freak. I greatly prefer the layout of the 6 button genesis and saturn controllers, especially when it comes to fighting games. I never got used to hitting the shoulder buttons in place of attack keys and spent a lot of my time on SNES playing with the Capcom Soldier Pad. Ultimately I was looking for something that would facilitate my preferred layout but also offer a bunch of buttons for mapping things to. Enter the line of officially licensed Sega Saturn controllers from Retro-Bit. The only negative is the home button appears to be unique to the Switch and is not mappable, but it gives me A, B, C, X, Y, Z, Start, Select, Left bumper and Right bumper to map inputs to which neatly fits all of the systems that are playable on the Retro Freak. I have to use it wired, but I went ahead and got the Bluetooth model for future options.

Death Stranding - The Final Run
Death Stranding – The Final Run

Lastly I have been trying to wrap up Death Stranding, and spent most of the day yesterday working my towards the eventual conclusion of the game. My grand plan had been to be finished with it by the time Horizon Zero Dawn lands next week, and I think that is well within reach… at the very least finishing the story. There are a bunch of miscellaneous side quests that I could be doing, but I have to say the mountain region really killed my joy for running random fetch quests. Hideo Kojima really loves sending you completely out of your way… because there have been three times so far when I have been asked to more or less traverse the entirety of what was then my game map. Yesterday I was asked yet again to traverse from the furthest possible point on the west coast of the map, all the way to the east coast of the map while dealing with extremely ramped up versions of everything I had encountered before.

Death Stranding - Corpse in a Cart
Death Stranding – Corpse in a Cart

At this point… I am ready to be done. I have greatly enjoyed this game and the storyline has wound its way through some deeply interesting lore and world building bits, but I am ready to say goodbye to Sam Porter Bridges. It is a phenomenal game, and pending you have the time to really spend exploring it then I would highly suggest giving it a go. There is a lot that you have to get used to early in the game, but it really is a masterpiece as far as games go. What has been surprising is how much of the stuff I considered to be complete nonsense on day one, has been fully explained and has paid off in a significant way. Extremely impressive.