Open World RPG

Steam Pal

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Good Morning Friends! I am currently like many in the holding pattern for the Steam Deck, checking my purchase history page to see if it has shipped yet. In my travels, I have found out that this exists, and feel like you all need to know as well. I introduce to you Steam Pal, which is apparently the original name of the Steam Deck when it was in development. Since everything in Japan needs to have a mascot, this comes from the Steam Deck Japan regional Twitter account. I love this mascot so much, and I especially love the fact that there is a tiny valve on top of its head.

It has apparently been seen at the Tokyo Game Show attached to the carrying case on display in the Steam Deck booth. I have to admit I really hope that this is something that crosses the ocean because I think everyone would be better off with a tiny Steam Pal guarding their expensive toy. I think that I have reached peak excitement for the Steam Deck, and I am sure like always you will be flooded with testing information when I get my hands on it. I fully expect to install lots of unsanctioned things on mine so will hopefully be able to report how well things like the Epic Game Store and Xbox Game Pass work on the device. I’ve also been holding off on any more emulation devices because I knew that eventually, the Steam Deck would blow them all out of the water.

In other news, I have been playing quite a bit on the New World PTR and working my way through the story and questing. There are so many small quality-of-life changes coming with this patch. The New World channel on the AggroChat podcast slack has been flooded with random observations that I have made while running around. Some examples are… you now get bonus experience the first time you craft a new item, making it more valuable to just craft a bunch of different things. There is a visual indicator now to denote “named” items that drop with static stat packages so that you can easily differentiate them from random rolled loot. All of the factions have bases now, and they are themed based on the faction. Harvest breakpoints have been lowered a bit so that you can get to higher tiers of materials a bit faster and now those “rare” drop items can be created out of base materials so if you really need Fae Iron to craft something, you can just pour Iron ore into making some.

My biggest takeaway is that I am in love with the Greatsword. If this weapon had existed at launch I would have been a Greatsword main. I believe whoever designed this weapon damage-dealing kit, was absolutely used to playing a Greatsword Warrior in Guild Wars 2. So many of the abilities feel like they were lifted straight from that game. I have a multi-slash attack that feels very much the same and a spinning charge attack that can be used to either get into battle or get out of battle quickly. The only thing that doesn’t really fit is that there is a big jumping hit that starts as an uppercut but has a follow-up downward slash. I need to respec at some point and play around with the tanking abilities to see if I like those as well. I am looking forward to when this game has loadouts, which are apparently coming… because I could absolutely see having a greatsword damage build-out and a greatsword tank build-out.

I finished up my night with a little bit of Cyberpunk. This game is absolutely “comfort gaming” for me and really other than ARPGs… the whole Open World RPG genre is my comfy place. There was a time when I would boot up Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas, but now I tend to gravitate towards Cyberpunk and Witcher 3. I am not terribly far into the game on this playthrough and when I decided to go to bed last night, I was about halfway through the initial braindance sequence. I hope there was a reasonable checkpoint because the game would not let me save… so I ultimately just bailed out. I don’t think I am necessarily done with Path of Exile, and am most definitely not done with Diablo III Season 27… but I needed a break from that style of gameplay for a bit.

Testing Assumptions

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I made a post, and after reading through the comments… specifically that of Bhagpuss I realized I did make quite a few assumptions. After playing so many MMORPGs with so many different people over the years, I assumed that most people had a stacked list of acquaintances after spending decades playing these titles. I long ago ran out of space in my Battle.net friends list and am consistently having to delete people to find space to add new ones, but that is in part the side effect of leading a raid for a few expansions. As a result, I decided to test these assumptions to see how true my point of view happened to be. So the easiest means of doing this was to cobble together a Twitter poll and then ask folks to retweet it around a bit to try and get a more diverse smattering of eyeballs on it.

So first off I realize that my methodology is a bit flawed. There are only 144 votes at the time of taking this screenshot, and it is limited to those who are active on twitter and the range that 29 retweets will get you… which according to Twitter analytics is a little over 800 impressions. Folks who are active on social media are probably already self-selected into a group of those who are either more socially active or at least more interested in being socially active. However, if you accept those flaws, the numbers more or less shake out like I thought they would. Some 86.1% of users view starting on the same server as friends as a positive thing, 4.2% considered it neutral, and 9.7% prefer to go it alone. Part of what makes me think these numbers are pretty stable is for the most part yesterday after the first hour of the poll, the percentages stayed mostly unchanged within a margin of error. If you want to chime in or just watch the process of the poll, I believe I have it up for another day.

I played a bit more of New World on the PTR server yesterday, and if I thought the redone Monarch’s Bluff was cool… Everfall is even cooler. It has a whole gaslit industrial revolution era vibe to it, with considerably more modern housing. This makes me wonder what exactly the rework of the other towns will bring. I am hoping that they keep this going forward with doing each town as though it had been built during a different era on the island. I think I have followed the main story quest as far as I can for right now because it bugged out when I tried to do the latest version of the Soul Warden trial. The leveling is so much faster than when this game went live initially. I’ve only really poked at this game for two days and am already level twenty, and most of that was just from following the story quests. So I do believe then when they say that you will no longer need to do the town boards to gain levels.

In my travels, I came across someone with the name “Dr Demone Kim” so I am not sure if this is actually THE Youtuber or just a fan trying to look like him. I do know that he was recording some videos in Monarch’s Bluff but I have no clue what his new character name is. He got his original character stuck in Brimstone Sands, where anytime he logs in he pretty much instantly dies. It is super cool thought to bump into a name I at least recognize, even if it is not his account. We are still trying to sort out how we are going to approach this game when the patch drops. Right now I am leaning towards picking whatever normal server happens to be the lowest population and rolling there, in the hope that everyone else that is planning on doing the same can as well. This would leave open the option for folks who don’t want to re-roll to just move their characters with one of the free tokens, whereas the fresh start servers will be locked for transfers.

I had one of those weird nights where nothing really felt right gaming-wise, so toward the end of the evening, I wound up back in Cyberpunk 2077. I thought I would check out some of the patch changes, and so far I am on board with the wardrobe system. It was always one of the things that bugged me that I could not really control my appearance if I was trying to optimize my gearing. I would try and latch onto the first decent-looking legendary item I could find and then just keep upgrading it, so I could maintain a specific look and feel. I started another femme V as I have yet to play through the game completely on anything other than my original masculine V. I went for the nomad story start, in part because I actually want to see the questline that involves Alanah Pearce. I have no clue if I will stick with this play-through or bounce back into more multiplayer nonsense.

It is a bit of a scattered post this morning, but those sometimes happen.

Reluctant Enforcer

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Good Morning Friends! I spent another night roaming around the countryside in Red Dead Redemption II. This is something that I have been told by friends who have played the game… but this world is damned gorgeous. Once I managed to slow down my own pace of only tackling a single quest at a time, the entire pace of the world seemingly slowed as well. I sat down to play this and before I knew it three hours had passed and it felt like minutes. This is really only something that happens to me in a large way when I get into the “just one more turn” cycle of a 4x game. There are so many times that I am on my way to do one thing, and a side event will pop up that catches my attention. I lifted a horse off a lady and took her back to town for example. I dig the way that the game gives you temporary waypoints for these activities without completely removing what was your previously tracked waypoint.

When I first started the game over a year ago, it was after playing Witcher 3. As a result, when it came time to name my horse I named it Roach since that horse was such a reliable companion. So far this Roach also seems to be an overwhelmingly reliable companion. Similarly, Roach seems to always be tied up nearby whenever I need a ride. I got waylayed by the O’Driscoll gang that just happened to have a stagecoach. After dispatching my assailants I hid their bodies and took the Stage Coach off to the fence to get a little pocket money. I wondered exactly how this would work, but after parking the Coach in the barn… my trusty Roach was tied up on the fence line waiting for me. It seems like I picked a fitting name.

The other thing that I have noticed is that while I am a bandit… I tend to make the good guy choices more often than not. I did not like being an enforcer for a money lender, and quite honestly wish I had an option to just give them some of my money as a result. It seems like I make more than enough money killing O’Driscolls who are constantly hunting me it seems. I made the mistake of riding into Blackwater the other night when the waypoint system went nuts and tried to take me through there. It is disturbing just how fast the roaming bands of lawmen found me. I’ve got someone down in that area that the game is pointing me towards and I am not really sure how best to get to them.

All in all this game is acting as the perfect diversion to keep me from burning out on Path of Exile. The new season dates have been announced and I know in a few weeks I will be grinding up an entirely new set of characters. I am pretty set on playing the Inquisitor, and as a result, I am cool to taper off my playtime for the moment and dive into something completely single-player. It is funny how for me at least I have to be in the right frame of mind to attach to a game. This was true for Guild Wars 2 and Path of Exile that I bounced off so many times, and has been true so far with Red Dead Redemption II. I have to be in the mood for a specific sort of game experience to really open up to it. I think this is why the whole AggroChat Gameclub thing galled me so much in the past, is that it forced me to play a game that I wasn’t necessarily into it at that exact moment… and wound up ruining the experience of playing those games because my brain viewed it as homework.

Jail Breaks and Drunken Preachers

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Sometimes I get hit by a whim and have to indulge it. Last night was one of those nights and the particular whim was to boot up Red Dead Redemption II and see if I could get into it. There is something about the style of game that Rockstar makes that I do not love. Namely, I greatly prefer the open-world questing style of something like Witcher 3, where I can load up on a bunch of quests and then do them willy-nilly as I roam the countryside. RDR2 however requires you to focus on a single quest chain until it is complete and harkens back to an older on-rails style of mission-based questing. I think this realization ultimately caused me to bounce from this game when I first attempted to play it. However knowing this and expecting this, I had hoped that maybe I could return with the right frame of mind and actually enjoy myself.

In the grand scheme of things I think it worked. I enjoyed my evening roaming around on horseback and doing small adventures, including busting a character that I do not like very much at all… out of a jail. That mission was “a lot” but we survived… but I am guessing I won’t be able to go back to the town of Strawberry very soon. I also spent some time saving a drunkard preacher from getting hit by a train and am slowly working my way through the quests that I know I have. I am guessing there are also bounties that I can run for the local sheriff, which might be a good idea given that I have done a few unsavory things lately.

Arthur Morgan is a really interesting character because he is not exactly what I would expect from the hero of a western adventure. He seems like one of the background characters from something similar to a Bioware game… that has been suddenly thrust into the forefront of the adventure. He is not unlikeable but also not terribly charismatic either. I guess this quality makes it fairly easy for you to insert your own intentions into his character because he doesn’t seem to have any particularly strong leanings from the start. It seems like his defining characteristics are his reliability and willingness to do whatever needs to be done. I have a feeling before we finish this adventure that those traits are going to be used and betrayed.

I am uncertain how often I am going to be returning to the winding world of Red Dead Redemption II, but I enjoyed my time spent better than my last foray.