MMORPG

Regularly Playing: January 2020 Edition

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For those who have read this blog for awhile, you will know that I have this semi-monthly column in which I talk about the games I have been playing regularly and also use this as an excuse to update my blog’s sidebar. The fourth quarter of 2019 was not a good time for regular updates to this because I failed to do one in October and also completely failed to do one in December. With the new year I am hoping to get back on track and keep these, but I have to warn you… today is going to be a bloodbath. Many games are being dropped from the list because quite honestly some of my gaming patterns have changed drastically over the last few months.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 – PC

Destiny 2 represents one of only a few games that I am regularly playing that would classify as an endless game. I’ve had a shift away from Massively Multiplayer Online gaming towards more finite single player titles of late, and as such those evergreen games that I always spent time in have suffered greatly. I’ve come to realize that I had not really finished many games because I always wound up getting distracted by the online fare, and if I instead ignore them I find I actually do enjoy polishing games off. Destiny 2 however is near and dear to my heart and is the sort of thing that I can return to over and over again for short bursts. While I am sure that I am making Thalen sad for not playing much, I have missed out on a bunch of things and am mostly okay with that. I do want to finish the seasonal grind at some point but I have 40 some days to do that.

Diablo 3 – PC and Switch

Diablo 3 is another one of those games that is so much part of my core identity that I am not sure if there will truly ever be a period of time when I am not at least idly playing it. Since the time of last posting I completely finished the PC Seasonal Content as a Demon Hunter and made it up through Slayer on the Switch with a Whirlwind Barbarian. The Switch is excellent for grinding a bit from bed before falling asleep, but even of late I have been opting out of that for a few reasons that I will get into later. With the talk of Diablo 4 on the horizon and the conversion of Torchlight Frontiers to Torchlight III, I still find myself extremely connected to this now aging game. I’ve just not found an adequate replacement to truly scratch the same action rpg ich.

To The New and Returning

Here is where the sad bits come in… there really isn’t anything new to be adding to this list. I have played several games but none of them are the sort of things that I expect to be adding to the list in any sort of a permanent manner. Instead I think I am going to implement a new feature called “Ships Passing in the Night” where I talk about some of the games that I had short but intense interactions with, but feel the chapter is either closed or will be closed once I complete them.

Ships Passing in The Night

The Witcher 3 – PC

I have so much love for this game, and while I fully expect to go back and play it at some point I am effectively done with it for the moment. For years I found this game incomprehensible in the way it sorta just drops you in the middle of everything with limited explanation. It was only through watching the Netflix Witcher series that I was able to gain proper purchase and glean enough information to make me feel firmly planted in this games universe. Since then I have been on a tear of playing through everything I could stand from the Witcher games and even reading the novels. The first Witcher will likely always be an impassable wall for me, but I have accepted it. This third game however goes on the top games of all time list for me personally.

The Witcher 2 – PC

After playing through the first Witcher game I had so many unanswered questions, and as a result I opted to do things backwards and go back searching for the answers in Witcher 2. While it was a bit of a struggle to get used to the interface, I eventually mastered it and had a phenomenal time doing what was effectively a golden path play-through of the non-human side of the story. I even was engaged enough to restart and try playing through the human side, only to determine that I had absolutely made the correct choice the first time around and wander away like a bored toddler. This game is always going to have a soft spot in my heart, but it is a deeply flawed experience, but one worth experiencing. Unfortunately I realized too lately that the answers to all of my questions lie in the books and not the past video games.

Greedfall – PC

Another flawed but phenomenal gameplay experience is that of Greedfall. It is a game that is tackling some themes that I have never quite seen a game tackle, which are really spending time exploring the sins of the colonial era. While there are some weird things going on at times with the interface and with combat, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience playing this game and as a result it has caused me to be interested in a deep dive of the developers back catalog of games. If you love the Bioware style of games you might legitimately be interested in exploring the games from french developer Spiders.

The Technomancer – PC

This is the second game I have played by Spiders and I am enthralled. This is currently my gaming main squeeze, at least until I finish it and It is a thoroughly interesting experience. The game is set in a post colonial Mars where it is ruled by rival corporations and military powers that end up creating a pretty damned oppressive environment. That said the game threw me a massive curve ball yesterday and opened up considerably and I am so there for the long ride. Imagine a setting that blends Blade Runner, Dune, Total Recall and the Red Faction games with a dash of Fallout into a single setting. I actually am enjoying the combat in Technomancer way more than I did Greedfall, and I am curious what things are going to be like if I keep going backwards in the Spiders catalog.

TemTem – PC

It is possible that this game might make it to regularly playing status, but for now I am throwing it in this category because I am just not sure. It is a Not-Pokemon MMORPG and it is charming as hell and does a really good job of both mirroring the best parts of Pokemon and bringing new things to the genre. The only thing that I find lacking is there is no xp sharing system and you legitimately have to fight with your not-pokemon to level them instead of doing what I do and just dragging them along for the ride. I’ve only played a few hours on this latest build even though I was a backer and have played various builds along the way. Time will tell if this becomes something more serious for me or not.

To Those Departing

Dragalia Lost – Android

Sorry Dragalia… you had a really good run but there are two things that happened. Firstly the gameplay finally reached its point where it became repetitive to a fault. Secondly I have been trying to read more often and as such that time when I was spending playing Dragalia Lost got replaced with time in the Kindle app. I am not the type of player that ever opts to play a mobile game if I have access to other options, so once it lots its prime real estate for bedtime gaming it really dropped off my radar. I am happier to be reading each night than to be spending time in a repetitive grind that doesn’t really go anywhere.

The Outer Worlds – PC

Sorry Boo, it’s me not you. This is a game I expect to return to and finish up, but in truth it is one of those things that should have graced the new category and not really added as a regularly playing. I’m somewhere around halfway done with the game and I figure when I deplete my current run of bioware-like games I fully expect to dust this off and finish it up. I love the game lots, but just have not been playing it.

World of Warcraft Classic – PC

It just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I can’t fully explain it, but after the absence when I was frustrated with Blizzard over the Hong Kong thing… I found it impossible to get reconnected and actively start playing again. Someone let the magical blue smoke escape and it just doesn’t do much of anything for me right now. I am for whatever reason in the wrong mind state to be enjoying it and as such it leaves list.

World of Warcraft Retail – PC

While I know without a doubt that I will be back and playing Shadowlands… for the moment I have zero interest in anything going on in this game. It is sad because I dearly love my Facepull family, but for now at least I am loving them from a distance. There is just something about World of Warcraft at the moment that I find a massive turn off, because I have tried to log in a few times but jettison in a perpendicular trajectory really quickly. Battle for Azeroth really did ruin the game for me, and I guess I hope it is not a permanent condition because I still have fond memories of how much I enjoyed Legion.

Summary

So there we have it, like I said it is a bit of a bloodbath because I have whittled down the regularly playing list to two titles. I am pretty sure this is the smallest it has ever been since the implementation of it. For now I am very much on a kick of not playing MMORPGs, but time will tell how long that will actually last.

Josie the Pussycat

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Lets be truthful at this point. You are not coming here for my writing anymore, but instead updates tales of a tiny furry butt that now officially inhabits my household. Yesterday did not exactly go as planned, because when we went to visit on Monday they told us that it was within the realm of possibility that we might get a call yesterday to pick miss Josie up. We have officially named her Josie the Pussycat and I guess in my mind I didn’t want to finish the prep work for fear of jinxing it. Just shy of 4 pm I got a phone call from the vet that works with the Animal Shelter and by 4:30 I was jetting out of downtown to head over there to get her. We have kept the pet carrier in the car at the ready for the last several days as a sort of weird “go bag” for when the event finally happened.

Luckily my wife was able to bail a little early and get home before me to finish putting litter in the litter box and setting out food and water and such. We were 98% there on setting up the isolation room we had planned, but the best laid plans often times go off the rails. Our upstairs bathroom is meant to be the master suite bathroom for the house and because of all of the extra space that is where we keep a row of litter boxes. Off of that room is a separate fully enclosed tub with a sitting bench and our master plan was to quarantine her off into that room. We had it all made up with a cat bed, a scratching post, a bunch of toys and of course a food and water dish. She did not like this room however and anytime we left it… she screamed her head off.

So that plan lasted all of five minutes and instead we regrouped and went with the ole tried and true. Every cat we have taken home has spent time in my wife’s office and as a result we now have another kitty suite set up in there. My wife of course spent the entire evening up there with her and she is already chill as hell. She does not seem to notice she had surgery because at one point she full leaped off of my shoulder before I could stop her. This morning she was curled up in the cat bed completely conked out and once I finish writing this post I am going to go in there and hang for a bit while my car warms up. I think she already realizes she is at home, and my hope is that we can introduce her into the wider house before very long. At the moment Kenzie is being a butt about it, but she is kinda a butt about everything. I am not getting to spend much time with Josie because I more or less need to be a stable force for Kenzie to rotate around out in the rest of the house. My wife will also be out of the country in a week or so and as a result probably needs to get in as much bonding time as possible in the short term.

My original plan for the evening was to hang out and play some TemTem, the not-Pokemon MMORPG. That however didn’t exactly go as planned. I was one of the backers of the game on Kickstarter and have played before when it was in stress test mode. I figured I would calmly slide in and start playing last night but when the login screen announced that I was in an over 9000 player queue, I figured it was probably not going to bode well. I did however manage to create a character and the only thing wrong with the character screen is the lack of beard options. Granted you are playing a child character… but I can dream of having a beard.

There were however opening day jitters as the game more or less was unplayable. During the time in the Tutorial area there were massive pauses between loading screens. Once I entered the open world however and encountered my first random TemTem… the game just straight up froze on me. Fifteen minutes later I abandoned hope and Alt+F4’d out of the game and went on with my night. They apparently posted about these issues, and were looking into resolving them. I am guessing they are using a peer to peer scheme and were blaming the issues on some players slow or unresponsive connections.

I have to give them credit because based on their Twitter feed it seems like they were furiously stomping bugs all night long and finally crashed out about 3 am my time. Considering that Tem Tem is developed by a Studio in Madrid Spain that means they signed off at 10 am after having spent all night trying to deal with launch issues. Hopefully tonight things will be more manageable.

What I did instead between trips into the other office to play with Josie was continue my adventures on Teer Fradee. The only real complaint I have with this game so far is that the encounters are not at all organic. As you travel along a path you know with pretty regularity that you will encounter groups of mobs at fixed points in the journey. Additionally there are large swaths of the game with absolutely nothing going on at all which feels a little weird. As I understand it this is sorta a general problem with games by this studio, but it is also the only thing that really stops it from feeling like a Dragon Age or Witcher game. I purchased the previous game by Spiders, and I think once I finish this one I will give it a shot as well. It is as a whole a little rough around the edges but the game itself is generally rather good.

Friday Debris

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This is Tripod, named such for the fact that she is a three legged cat that comes to visit from time to time. Tripod does not realize we love her yet, and bolts at the sight of us… but we do our best to try and make sure she has food. She is one of a handful of neighborhood cats that occasionally visit our house and we were scared to death that she was no longer with us. We’ve had a cold snap and for a couple of weeks we had not managed to catch any sight of her on the front porch cam where we put out food every day. However several times this week we have seen her lurking around the backyard which was pretty much the highlight of the week. We are hoping she is still around during the spring and summer months and maybe just maybe we can teach her that we are friendly people while we are out and about in the back and front yard more often.

This Friday post is somewhat turning into a “things left on the cutting room floor” post about the week. The other day I talked about restarting Witcher 2 so that I could go down the path that was not taken, and I have now reached the first branch in the road… and more or less determined that I made the correct choice the first time. While I greatly enjoyed the “non-human” path, I gotta say I am not loving the blatant racism and bigotry of the “human” path right now. Additionally it is super weird to have as my companions, characters that I more or less learned to greatly dislike during the other play through. As a result my completion of this play through is pretty much in jeopardy. In many games the various path options are equally good and it is just a matter of taste, but for me at least there seems like a clear correct choice here and I made the wrong one on attempt two.

The other issue from which I am suffering is that I am staying up way the hell too late reading and it is starting to cut into my sleep schedule. It feels thoroughly odd to be saying this because I have not been a person to stay up late reading that often in my life. This is complicated by the fact that I read relatively slowly and that at least until my wife falls asleep she is pretty regularly making random comments while I attempt to follow the text. At this point I am roughly halfway through the second book in the Witcher series and I am looking forward to getting into the novels proper having focused on the two prequel short story collections first. The books have not really done much yet to improve my opinion of Yennefer, which is weird because I thought all of the loyalty fans have must have come from reading the books.

Another weird revelation is that there were a lot of moments in Witcher 3 that I mistook as me not knowing what was going on because I had not played the other games. Now I know I am completely incorrect in that assessment and instead the game is just deep diving into character relationships from the books without giving the player much of a heads up about it. Last night I read for example the story of Dudu Biberveldt, a character that I just assumed had showed up in the games before. However having played the second game and watched several synopsis videos of the first game… I am pretty certain that is not a thing and he just lives in the novels. I have to admit though it is this sort of thing that makes the setting so infectious for me, because the things that are constantly left unanswered make me want to go then dig for the answers. I have a feeling that it might have the opposite effect on some of my friends however.

Yesterday was a big reveal of the next expansion for Elder Scrolls Online, and we are going back to Skyrim. The expansion seems like it is going to center on the Solitude area and more importantly Blackreach, one of the coolest areas in Elder Scrolls V. I am all about Dwemer ruins, and supposedly Blackreach is going to make up roughly half of the playable content area in this expansion. They are once again doing a year long story that unfolds over the course of several updates, and considering that I didn’t play any of the “Year of the Dragon” content, I am wondering if this is time for me to update the client and go back into the game. I have most of Morrowind and all of the newer content to experience.

I realize this in some ways goes directly in the face of my whole desire to stop chasing the forever game, but for Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Star Wars the Old Republic I play them more or less in a single player manner. I come back to the game after a large bundle of content has built up and then can happily binge the new story in an almost Netflix manner before leaving once again and going off and playing other things. I wish I could play World of Warcraft in the same sort of manner, but the way their patch content is released makes it a struggle to try and figure out what the hell is going on at any time if you were not around to see it doled out in small chunks. I am realizing that I find I greatly prefer content that is gated behind completing the previous content just for sake of making it easier to follow.

Games of the Decade: 2019

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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC

Over the last few weeks I have been doing this series where I recount the games that were important to me during a specific year of the last decade. We have now reached the end and it is time for me to talk about this past year… a year that I seemed to have way more issue narrowing down than the others. I guess as time passes your thoughts galvanize around specific games as they stand the test of time. For this past year everything feels very fresh in my mind, and as a result I just look out at a great year full of a lot of games I enjoyed. For those who have not been following along, here are all of the other posts and links.

Now let’s dig into what is going to prove to be the longest of the posts. I am bad at whittling things down. Let’s start off with a few honorable mentions.

Anthem

Anthem – PC

This game is a controversial title for this year, and I have a bunch of mixed feelings about it. It was very much an important game to me this year, but also serves as the biggest disappointment. I had been tracking this title since it first showed up at E3 with what was apparently a cobbled together demo reel that did not represent anything close to what the game was like at that moment. We found all of this out after the failed release of the title thanks to a Jason Schreier tell all piece about just how bad the development cycle went. Why I am conflicted is that I loved the game that was there. I loved jetting around in an Iron Man suit and firing down heavy ordinance while bopping things in the head with my electrified mace and then detonating bombs as I jetted away. I want this game to find its feet and turn into what I hope it could be. For the time being however I am not playing it and based on my friends list… no one is given I added hundreds of people from one of the discord communities. I hope in 2020 it can have a resurrection story we will all be proud of, but for now I am giving it an Honorable Mention footnote.

Kind Words

Kind Words – PC

This one is also going on the honorable mention list, largely because it is not really a game at all. It is more of a social experiment where you are placed behind the veil of anonymity and asked to say nice things to strangers. The funny thing is… this almost single-handedly dismantles the greater internet fuckwad theory, which assumes that anonymity leads to toxic behavior. This experience places you in a sandbox and directs you to say nice things…. and it works. I spent a few days messing around with this thoroughly charming “game” and have not touched it since. However if you need something good and pure in your life I highly suggest you checking it out.

Baba Is You

Baba Is You – PC/Switch

For the first real contender of the year we have the insanely charming puzzle game called Baba Is You. The game is deceptively simple and requires you to screw around with what feels like programming logic until you reach the “Is Win” condition. This involves you pushing things around until you can move whatever the “Is You” object over to the “Is Win” condition. This all sounds like madness I am sure until you have played it, but the end result is countless hours of making your way through puzzles that sometimes make you feel like a god damned genius when you finally arrive at the solution. I never quite beat the game but I often times wander away from things when a shiny object enters my field of view. I did however spend an awful lot of time playing this and enjoying every moment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

FFXIV Shadowbringers – PC

Remember that whole rule I set out and then violated about not adding expansions to a list? Yeah I am breaking it again because Shadowbringers is quite possibly the best Final Fantasy game I have ever played and also quite possibly the best JRPG. I was enthralled the entire time this expansion was expanding before me and there were several times where it made leaps that I had no clue was going to happen. It also tells a fresh story that I had not really seen in a game like this before that while it in itself is a bunch of remixed elements we have seen, is presented to make something fresh, I still don’t want to dive into the spoilers of this story because it is that damned good and if you have not experienced it before then you absolutely need to do so. Post launch I have fallen back out of habit of logging into Final Fantasy XIV, but at some point I will come back and gobble up the story goodness that has arrived in my passing.

The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds – PC

A running theme of this year is about wish fulfillment, and one of the things I have wanted for years is a spiritual successor to Fallout New Vegas. I like Fallout 3 and 4, and think they are good at doing the things that they are doing… but I will always have a deep burning fire in my heart for New Vegas. Outer Worlds is a completely new property set in a dystonian universe where capitalism has gone to its absolute furthest possible nefarious ends. It is a time of monolithic MegaCorps, but they are presented not in a cyberpunk future but instead of one of a space western that draws heavily upon similar genres like the Firefly series. What makes this game shine are its characters and the writing that brings them to life. Parvati is pure and precious and I will fight to my last breath to keep her and her fledgling relationship with Junlei safe.

Jedi Fallen Order

Jedi Fallen Order – PC

I am being completely honest here that this is a game I never expected to see the light of day. EA has had this habit of killing off anything that looked like a great new Star Wars game in favor of trying to create lootbox hell holes. When this was first announced, I fully expected it to either turn out to be vapor ware or get cancelled. I cannot explain how happy I am to be wrong, and to have what is seemingly the first “Soulsian” game that I have really loved. I am not sure what it is about the specific blend of elements but this is one of the best games of this decade, not just this year. The variable difficulty is key, but so is the way that this game makes you feel like you actually are a Jedi with lots of interesting tools to solve problems as they arise. BD-1 also is the best dog in video games ever, and I want a droid buddy that will sit on my shoulder as I go on adventures.

World of Warcraft Classic

World of Warcraft Classic – PC

For the longest time I have not really known if World of Warcraft was just a better game back in those early years or if I was simply viewing the world through rose colored glasses. While I have enjoyed a lot of the quality of life improvements, there was something lost along the way and Classic shone a spotlight on that with blaring clarity. While I am not actively playing it for various reasons, I fully expect to return at some day and push my character the rest of the way to 60. I enjoyed this game with my whole being right up until the point that the whole Hong Kong nonsense started and I felt bad for supporting anything made by Blizzard. I’ve stepped down off of that soap box and made my peace, but it was just enough time to knock me out of the rhythm of playing this game. It is still a thoroughly enjoyable experience and I hope I can figure out how to make my brain crave again.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC

We are wrapping things up for the year with a bit more of that wish fulfillment. Castlevania Symphony of the Night is quite possibly my favorite game to have ever been developed. So when I heard in 2015 that Koji Igarashi was going to be creating a brand new franchise that would serve as the spiritual successor to this game I loved, I was ready to throw a near infinite amount of money at the screen. At that time it was slotted for a 2017 release and while the game ultimately was two years late, the delays were worth every moment. This is an example of a creator and team listening to the fans and going back to the drawing board to create better ways of delivering the end product. The only blemish however is the Switch release which ultimately still lags behind the quality of the other available platforms. The game itself is a masterpiece of the Metroidvania genre and introduces a brand new setting with its own deeply interesting lore and characters. I am hooked and I am hoping that the game as a whole made enough of a splash to warrant many future adventures.

That’s it folks… the end of my series on the games of this past decade. What are your thoughts, and what are some of the games that you felt I missed along the way? Drop me a note in the comments.