Open World RPG

Bob Rides Again

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Hey Friends! I decided to take yesterday off because I was not really feeling up to blogging… and also had the day off. We had a cold snap this weekend that basically killed any desire to go out into the world and do things. Additionally we have been on this kick of trying to cook more at home rather than door-dashing everything. So the end result was that we mostly hunkered down while my wife read and I played lots of video games. I stumbled onto something humorous in Forza Horizon and if you follow me on Twitter you already know this. They have in game the 1974 Honda Civic and it is very close to what was my very first vehicle. So of course I had to pick it up and play around with it… and it drives pretty much exactly like I remember the ACTUAL “Bob” driving like.

The actual “Bob” has been rotting away at my parent’s house since I parked it there in college. There were significant transmission issues when I stopped driving it, and now it more or less sits there like many other vehicles rusting away. I don’t really clearly remember if I paid $100 or $200 for the car, but I do remember buying it myself outright when I got my drivers license. At 6’4″ it was never a comfortable vehicle for me to drive… but it was transportation from point A to point B. In my most immediate circle of friends I also represented the only one with transportation and as a result ended up playing chauffeur quite often. It is kinda cool to tool around a virtual world in something that feels so damned familiar.

Over in Witcher 3 I wrapped up this current play-through, or at least the main story. I managed to navigate my way this time to what I would consider the “best” ending. I had originally planned on going with a Yennifer play-through, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Triss is just better, sorry for all of you Yennifer stans out there but it is true. Mostly the part I was wanting to correct this time around was the fate of Ciri, because last play-through I made some mistakes and it wound up with Ciri in a not great position. Not going to go into too many details here in case I have friends who have yet to play this game. Side note… if you have not played this game you really should. Just don’t let the early nudity turn you off or set your impressions of what the game at large is going to be like.

The bulk of my weekend however was spent playing God of War on the PC. Yes I am one of those suckers who rebuys games that I own on other platforms. If I have the chance of playing something with a mouse and keyboard I am going to take it. I never made it terribly far into this game on the PS4 or PS5 and now that I am playing on PC it is really in my element. I can only hope that at some point Ghost of Tsushima gets a PC port, because these big open world games just feel better with a mouse and keyboard. I am sure I will probably write a post about it of its own, but I am having a blast. I get the feeling that I am nearing the end of the main story, because I just got one of those “better wrap up everything you need to do” messages. So that places this in the 20-30 hour game range for gameplay, so in that sweet spot of not too short but very much not too long either.

Rowing to Velen

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Good Morning Friends. This has been a bit of a weird week and I am not feeling super awesome. I am uncertain if I actually talked about it on the blog but I did something very stupid last week and ended up with several second degree burns. Thankfully however at this point they have all healed minus one spot on my forefinger. As far as gaming goes I have been alternating between wrapping up my play-through of Witcher 3 on the PC and playing the Xbox Series X. I am getting close to the end of the main campaign and am hoping I am on the right track for a very specific ending. In theory tonight or Saturday I should finish this up.

Apart from that I am spending quite a bit of time dinking around with Forza Horizon 5. I am not sure why the game is bringing me so much joy, especially since I seem to spend most of my time just driving around aimlessly. I’m installing it on my PC just to test a theory… but I am guessing I share everything between my XSX play sessions and PC play sessions. I have a handful of vehicles that I really enjoy, and managed to pull an orange rarity vehicle that allows me to fully customize the paint job. So I have this slick car with a two tone paint job that is purple fading to navy. Unfortunately I have been caught up in the moment and been forgetting to press the share button so you get this screenshot again.

This weekend Dad of War arrives on the PC, and I am probably going to be spending quite a bit of time playing that. I have it on the PlayStation but I remember playing it initially and thinking… that I really wish I could play it with a keyboard and mouse. We will see if it magically makes everything better for me, but regardless it is a game that I would love to play through fully. Forza has become my quick drop in and drop out game when I need a break from whatever epic saga I happen to be working on.

Apart from that I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning. I hope you are having a great week and end up having a phenomenal weekend.

Mods and Witcher 3

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I am spending an excessive amount of time roaming around the world of Witcher 3. Last night I finally wrapped up most of the loose ends in the Velen/Novigrad areas and made my way over to the Isle of Skellige. I specifically love this sequence of the game, so often times I try and wrap everything up so that when I get there I can feel like I can really explore it freely. Writing blog posts when I am actively playing a story driven game… that features a large number of spoilers for anyone who has NOT played it… always lands in this really weird place for me. I don’t want to accidentally ruin an experience for someone that might follow in my footsteps and become interested in the game. However at the same time there is only so much time that I can spend talking about things in only the most general of terms.

Instead this morning I thought I would talk about some of the care and feeding of this current Witcher 3 play through. If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know that I greatly favor the PC as a platform, and one of the main reasons behind this apart from my love of keyboard and mouse controls is the fact that I can easily modify the game to behave the way I want it to. If there is something that annoys me with a console game, I basically have to make a decision if I am going to suck it up and deal with it… or just quit playing the game. On the PC however we have another option… to fix whatever behavior I personally find offending and then move on with the modified and more enjoyable experience. Along with most of the internet… I use NexusMods as my core source for all my modding needs and maintain a subscription to it just to speed up data transfers.

I am going to take a little bit and talk about the mods that I am running on this particular play through of the game.

Over 9000 – Weight Limit Mod

One of the things that I hate almost more than anything in a big open world like this is being limited in my ability to loot and scoot. I hate inventory management. It is legitimately the bane of my existence in games, and when I can either install a mod or run a console command and never have to worry with it ever again… I am always going to take that option. Thankfully the mod scene has made this extremely painless and given me a mod that takes my item weight limit from around 100 to 9999. This allows me to run around for days without caring about managing items while still looting until my heart is content.

Autoloot – Autoloot the Items You Want

Going hand in hand with this is a mod that just automagically loots everything when you kill anything or interact with a container. It converts the notifications to a little toast window in the lower lefthand corner of the screen giving you a quick notification of everything that was just sucked into your inventory. The specific variant that I am running is the file set that will keep you from accidentally stealing anything. I am contemplating swapping over to the Herbs and Corpses variant however which apparently auto picks up any herbs that you run past that are in your loot radius. If a corpse has an item on it needed for quest progress, you still have to manually loot it.

Fast Travel from Anywhere

The map in Witcher 3 is massive, and this one is largely a quality of life change to make navigating around a bit easier. By default you have to make your way back to a signpost marked in green on your map, which will then allow you to teleport to any other signpost you have already unlocked. This mod is pretty straight forward and cuts out the travel time allowing you to just crack open the map and teleport directly. This is phenomenal for when you have fought your way down into an area and are nowhere near civilization and just want to pop back to town to do something quickly. Essentially it makes Witcher work more like other games with fast travel points.

Lamp on Player’s Boat

The older I get the harder time I have with nighttime and picking out details… and this carries forward with video games as well. In general if I am running around at night in Witcher 3, I have my torch out but there are a number of actions that keep you from using your torch. One of these for example is piloting a boat and this mod simply adds a torch to every boat in the game giving you some illumination. It also makes it way easier to spot the boats in the world scattered along the coastline. Like most of the mods I am using it is the little quality of life things that I tend to tweak.

Cheap Dyes Everywhere and Dye-able Starting Armor

One of the cool features that was added into the game with the Blood and Wine expansion, is the ability to dye certain armor sets. This is a feature that I did not even know existed until I went searching for a mod to change the look of my favorite armor set. I love the Ursine Witcher armor, but I am not a big fan of the cream/green/red look that it comes with by default. What I wanted was the ability to dye my armor black like a proper Witcher armor should be. Now you cannot even start the Blood and Wine expansion before level 35, and the dyes don’t show up on vendors until then… but this mod changes that and makes a large number of vendors around the early parts of the game sell armor dyes and for cheap. Now I have my Ursine armor in darker shades and am significantly happier with life.

That is it folks. Those are all of the mods that I happen to be running at this moment. There is one that I have been eyeing that changes the scabbards for the swords to black but I have not messed with installing it because often times you have to deal with mod conflicts. For example there is an addon that I would love to use that marks every quest that you have in your journal on your map, so that you can know if there are other quests in the near vicinity that you can complete at the same time. However it conflicts with the Fast Travel mod, and I have not wanted to mess with figuring out how to manually merge the two. For me a lot of the mods that I end up using remove friction that I do not personally find meaningful. Modding is ultimately just that a very personal choice, and while I would not say anything that I am doing is “required” to enjoy the game it absolutely improves my enjoyment.

Good Chorfun

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Good Morning Friends! I am slowly trying to get back into the swing of things. My last day of work for the year was 12/17 and as a result I am good and toast when it comes to actually getting up at normal times. Normal for me being 5:30 in the morning, but I am struggling forward regardless and trying to make a blog post happen. Apologies for the extremely sporadic nature of my posts over the last few weeks but I was very much “in vacation mode”. The truth is you didn’t miss an awful lot and I have fallen back into a single player gaming binge. For the last few weeks I have been getting up around 8 am when the synergy of my bladder and the cats wanting food coalesced into forcing me out of the bed. Now we are returning to being governed by an alarm and so far… the progress is mixed.

Thanks to watching my way through the second season of Witcher over the break, I have found myself returning to playing Witcher 3. This will be my second full play through of the game and it is just as good as I remember it being. There is something about the end of one year and the beginning of a new one… that seemingly drives me to wanting to play a big meaty open world single player adventure. The weirdest part about this most recent turtle is that it isn’t really due to me being stressed and needing a break from humanity. If anything I have the latent desire to be around other people, but my brain just wants to be playing these sort of games instead of diving back into the Endwalker alt leveling and gear grinding process.

It started initially as a good intentioned “lets have a break to let other people play this extremely congested game”, and has more or less turned into an obsession with completing all of the things in Velen and Novigrad. I love this world and setting and I love being my kind-hearted version of Geralt. Someone really in need and shouldn’t be spending coin in my services? Well if given the chance I will take the “you keep the coin” option. I will say that the game actively fights against you trying to turn Geralt into a questing knight however, because often times things don’t go down as you might hope. I’ve found a number of quests this time around that I somehow missed last time and me trying my best to save the say… has not necessarily been good enough. Then there are the comedy relief quests like the Trolls… and I love Witcher Trolls. It was also only on this playing… that I finally grasped what “Chorfun” meant.

The thing that I have been struggling with is that initially I had decided to give Yennifer a try this time around. However… I just can’t do it. Triss is just better in every possible way and I kinda hate that Yennifer is so hardly pushed as the “lore correct” answer. Yen is just not a good match for my kinder gentler soft-hearted version of Geralt. Yen makes sense if you are leaning into the whole “two hopelessly fucked up people who deserve each other” aspect of The Witcher universe, but just feels wrong to me personally. That said if you are a Yen stan I won’t get in your way… but I have a feeling I am going to keep choosing Miss Merigold over and over each time I play through.

All of this said… I have picked back up the novels and started up again where I left off with Blood of Elves. This time last year I read through the first two books… which are largely a collection of short stories. By the time I got to Blood of the Elves, it was just dense enough to make me bounce after reading the two much more casual reads in a row. For the last several nights I have been reading for about an hour on my phone and while I read terribly slowly… especially when my wife keeps trying to talk to me while reading… however I am about halfway through at this point. My wife and I have completely different “going to sleep routines”. For her it is like she needs to get all of her talking out of her system before she can sleep… but for me I need silence to wind down and the more she talks… the more I wake back up. Generally speaking through reading something is one of the better ways for me to drift off to slumber and reading the book on my phone gives me these perfectly bite sized chunks of the book formatted to fit the small screen.

Well this is a blog post down… and I am still awake so here is hoping I can get back into the swing of actually waking up on time and knocking out a post each morning. I had a great break and I hope you all did as well.