Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Preparing for New World

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Well folks it is time to talk about New World because next Tuesday it officially launches. I know I have not spoken about this in a really long time but there are several reasons for that. Firstly most of the time I have been playing New World has been under NDA. On my blog, I do my level best to abide by the non-disclosure agreements that are associated with closed Alpha and Beta testing. The negative about this however is it means that I largely just avoid talking about the game. In August of 2020, I wrote a few pieces on the game, because I was participating in a “preview” event that allowed public discussion. however, before that and for a long time after that event I was in private testing and simply could not talk about the game. Apart from that, I have remained fairly radio silent about the game other than occasionally mentioning that it was my intent to play it when it was released.

New World has been this interesting experiment because as games go it desperately needs to succeed. Amazon Game Studios has had a sequence of flops, and there is very much this feeling that New World has become this make-or-break scenario for the studio as a whole. As a result, this game has changed more than probably any Alpha/Beta test that I have been a part of. I greatly enjoyed the state of the game last August, and over time it has only gotten better and grown into more of a fleshed-out PVE experience. This has been somewhat to the chagrin of the PVP crowd, but time and time again they have proved not to be enough to make an MMORPG thrive. The game that exists today is this really enjoyable open-world sandbox of a game that lets you build your own class and more or less choose how you want to engage with it. I call it a sandbox, but it absolutely has theme park inspiration but seems to split the balance between the two constructs.

Why Are We Talking about this Now?

This game has been delayed so many times… enough that I legitimately cannot remember how many actual times the date has moved. It was supposed to launch last year, and then that date kept sliding into 2021 with August being another tentative date. When September was set, we were uncertain if it really would finally launch. However, based on this tweet on September 21st and the fact that they released the final list of official servers… I am assuming that all systems are go for launch. Now finally after all this time… I feel like I can reasonably work up some modicum of hype over it. This has been a bit of a hard game to love because traditionally you have a fixed point in time when you can expect it to be in your hands. With this game I legitimately halfway expected Amazon Game Studios to pull another launch date slip and tell us we were going to be getting it in October or November. Please note… I would have happily played the version we played back in August, but what they have added to the game since then is significant.

Amazon is taking this game launch seriously. If my math is correct there are 177 servers for the launch with 54 taking up NA East, 22 NA West, 64 Central Europe, 11 Australia, and 26 South America. That seems like a lot, but apparently the way the game is designed the servers align to specific themes which allows them to easily collapse them if need be to keep them feeling active. I mean this is a company that has the full support of AWS at their disposal, so I would hope they would figure out a way to quickly grow and shrink capacity. A good number of the names have been used before, which means they are likely going to have a baked-in player base that spent time on that server during alpha and beta tests. Other names are just going to be popular because of the name itself… like Valhalla is probably going to be a mess.

My friend Nimgimli raised an interesting point yesterday morning. He surmised that this is the first major Western MMORPG release since the impact of Streamers and their fanbases was a major disruptive force. He commented that in the past we would simply avoid whatever server that the GoonSquad was rolling on, and could feel relatively fine about that. I would also note that I used to track where the broad groups of noted Everquest Assholes like Fires of Heaven were rolling, but the concept is still valid. Instead of one large army that you have to avoid, you have a significant number of smaller pools of potentially awful experiences to avoid. That said Asmongold chose to roll on the FFXIV server I have played on since the launch of A Realm Reborn and the impact has been negligible other than general server congestion. However, if such things concern you greatly some excellent soul has created a tracker to keep tabs on which Streamers are rolling on which servers, credit to Scopique for pointing this out.

Where Are You Going?

After some thought, I have decided to saddle my horse to a group that Grakulen is involved with. A number of other Twitter-folk are there like Namaslay, Broximar, Accomp, and a whole slew of others that I am just not thinking of at this very moment. By a vote of the community, we are going to Minda which is a NA East server, and choosing to go with the Syndicate aka Team Purple aka The Illuminati. Marauders would be my first personal choice, largely because my favorite color is green and I think their custom gearsets look badass, but I am also fine with Purple which is my second favorite color. Basically, I was fine with being anything but Covenant… aka the religious zealots and that faction that more or less represents the Inquisition.

This isn’t my community and as such, I am hesitant to directly link the details in a public blog post. However given that I have already drafted several friends to the cause and they have been on board with this, I have a feeling that all are going to be welcome within reason. If you are interested in this expedition to the new world, hit me up in private and I can share the details of how to join the social infrastructure of this group. So to recap in boldface:

  • Server: Minda – NA East
  • Faction: Syndicate – Team Purple

Why Not Stalwart/Greysky?

One of the things that I have become known for over the years is leading a bunch of groups as we venture forth into new games. Generally speaking these either have fallen under the banner of House Stalwart, the guild I formed in World of Warcraft, or have been associated with Greysky Armada the Free Company I helped found in Final Fantasy XIV. When folks see me aligning with a game, they expect there to be a guild I am recruiting for associated with it. That is still more or less the same thing here, and I am always going to be more than happy to recruit my friends along for the journey. The key difference being I am just a visitor in the New World community and am in no way associated with its leadership. I figure at some point I am going to get asked the question by my loyal friends who will follow me to hell and back… why I didn’t just start my own thing.

New World has a lot of systems that benefit greatly from a large assemblage of players all pulling in the same direction. There is a territory control mechanic that comes with a significant number of benefits for the players associated with the company that controls said territory. Additionally, there are just a number of perks associated with being in a large guild in the first place. Everything in New World is player-driven, which means there are no vendors and everything is going to come from the labor of some player out in the world providing it. In this scenario, it is extremely beneficial to be part of a larger community that can pool resources and my hope is that by joining an existing initiative everyone is going to benefit from having a larger pool of potential supporters.

Lastly and this one is extremely key… I go into New World knowing it is going to be a secondary game for me. I enjoy it greatly, but I also enjoy it when I am playing it in a very low-key manner. Wherever I ended up, I did not want my activity… or potential lack thereof to make or break the guild as a whole. I know I have a large number of goals still looming in Final Fantasy XIV and I also know Endwalker launches in November which is going to consume my focus and attention. Joining with a large group of other players means I don’t have to feel guilty when I flit in and out of this game as my schedule allows. The game that I enjoy the most is casually roaming around doing PVE content and trade skills, and I feel like I can lend my hand as a seasoned MMO tank while also maybe helping out on large crafting initiatives.

When Does This Happen?

I’ve stated this a few times but New World launches next Tuesday, September 28th. We don’t know for certain when exactly the official launch time is but based on past experience with the Alpha and Beta processes… the servers oftentimes actually come online a little bit early. When I hear an official start time I am sure I will share it publicly. You can purchase the game from most of the usual suspects, and I start out as having my preorder through Amazon directly, but being completely honest… they don’t handle digital preorders in the best manner. I ultimately refunded and purchased through Steam where it has been a seamless process of getting into the more public testing events. Obviously as a result I would suggest going with Steam, but your mileage may vary. From what I am hearing we should be able to start the preload process at some time on the 27th.

I am going, to be honest, the experience is not going to be for everyone. However, if you find yourself enjoying games like Valheim, then I think you will probably dig New World. My goal is to get in and work on crafting because I want to largely be self-sufficient when it comes to armor and weapons. I am going to be playing a Sword and Board tank wearing full heavy armor, which means I am going to heavily focus on weapon and armor crafting. I am not entirely decided, but more than likely my secondary weapon is going to be the Two-handed Axe that they recently added to the game. However, it is equally likely that I might go Two-handed Hammer for the stun capabilities, which would allow me to also be somewhat of a PVP tank. I’ve refined this playstyle over the course of several tests and have honed in on exactly how I want to play the character.

Like I said above, if you are interested in coming along for this journey hit me up on the side and I will share the community information with you. Now that we have a confirmation of the date I am really starting to get excited. I’ve not really participated much in the last few tests because I did not want to wear that new shine off the gameplay experience. Hope to see you all on Aeternum.

Neighborly Luck Boosters

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Good morning friends, I had no intention of taking a break yesterday but this week has conspired against me. It is shocking what a difference having a good cup of coffee in the morning makes. On Monday we ran out of creamer and I had some truly heinous coffee in which I attempted to make a vanilla protein shake work… and it very much did not. During the day a whole other crisis ensued as we lost access to water for about half the day, and given that I have neighbors in visual range of my back yard the whole “peeing in nature” thing doesn’t quite work. Yesterday morning we were awoken at 4:47 by the awful sound of the next-door neighbors AC unit forcibly shutting off… as we lost power. This was off for the entire morning and given that the creamer we purchased was sitting in the fridge… I was deeply hesitant to open that in order to preserve the cold as long as possible. This morning however the dials all clicked into alignment and I have just finished my first cup of coffee the way I wanted it… and it was grand.

I am still very much grinding away towards my ultimate goal of having all classes to level 80. In fact, I have been trying to add a little bit more effort given that I know New World is going to be launching in a few days and I will be spending a significant chunk of time getting started over there. My goal is to reach a state of equilibrium where I am playing both games, but given my focus on the leveling goal that might be a little harder than I want it to be. I am updating the spreadsheet daily and there is a certain joy in seeing the numbers drift upwards. I tweaked my log scale line chart a bit to show the maximum number of total levels which is 1430 and better indicate where I am sitting on that curve.

It is still much easier to see progress on the bar chart where I am mapping each individual job and my current level. The main thing that I changed was adding level call-outs to each of the bars and changing the color of them to denote DPS, Tank, or Healer class. Visually it feels like I am way closer to my goal than I actually am. I should very easily push White Mage to level 80 today once the roulettes reset, but that would still leave me with 57 levels to go. Given that I really enjoy Heaven on High, I am working a bit on grinding out AST and BLM through those levels. Once I get to 71 Trust becomes an option, but that really is a somewhat mind-numbing offering. Trust levels go so much slower than actually running the dungeon with human beings. Getting to level 71 also opens up Bozja which is probably something that I should actually explore a bit further, but I do not find the joy in it that Asha and Waren seem to.

Another big thing that took place over the weekend is that the stars aligned just right and we were able to bring our next-door neighbor to the Free Company house and their assorted friends along for map night. In the car with me are Sigrid, Vita, and Aimi and we had a grand night of maps. I think they brought us significant luck because not only did we manage to make it to the final stage of a single portal… but we managed this feat twice. I am pretty convinced at this point that what happens in the dungeons is completely up to chance. However for the entirety of the night we each managed to clear just shy of a million gil in cash drops alone, not taking into account anything that we were able to sell after the fact.

I am not sure if there is a broad offering of bosses, but we managed to get one which a rework of Echidna from Void Ark. It was actually a somewhat challenging encounter or at least one that was pretty hectic. Another big bonus of the night is that we managed to drag along Eliyon who picked up most of the level between 79 and 80 on his White Mage. It was so good to finally be able to do something with Sig, Vita, and Aimi other than just waving and talking in Shirogane outside our respective houses.

I did not get a proper screenshot after conquering the dungeon, but I did manage to snap this one before we all exited. I kinda wish there was a higher alliance raid version of these maps, to be honest. Whatever the case I am glad we have gotten in the rhythm of running these every Sunday. They make for a really relaxing way to close out the week and a good way to just hang out with friends.

Patch 9.1.5 Thoughts

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Good morning friends. There is a topic that has been bouncing around in my skull for a few weeks now, and I have never really gotten around to speaking my mind about it. The thing is I am not even sure what I want to say. Patch 9.1.5 is sticking in my craw for a bunch of reasons, and I am not entirely certain what I want to say about it because I am afraid most of my thought processes are poisoned by built-up bile. There are so many changes going into the game that are needed. For example, maybe the love rocket icon should not have looked like a big cartoon penis for the first twelve years it was in the game. I am also all for the painting changes because quite frankly the artwork looked like shit, and the versions that are replacing it are rather nice.

However, 9.1.5 is shaping up to be this make-or-break moment for the game, with the devs seemingly dumping everything that players said they wanted into the game. Legion Timewalking is this giant fanservice event that brings back a bunch of things that folks had been pining for like the Mage Tower and an ability to collect a whole new set of alternate recolors. The problem is… this is an event… a limited time moment in the game where it is going to feel extremely good for players to come back and play but ultimately has an expiration date associated with it. This feels in so many ways like a lover in a toxic relationship asking you what they can do to keep you from leaving them. Players DID leave and the problem is… a single data point does not make a trend.

Then there is another part of me that is frustrated that if this could have been pulled together so quickly… why didn’t they do this years ago? The changes that are going into the game break so many of the things that I have long considered just the World of Warcraft design ethic. Previously it seemed like we could never get something just universally good for the players, without it also being horrible in some way. Like Transmog has gone through this cycle for years, with you being able to collect item appearances… but only for the armor class that can be equipped by the person looting the items. There is part of me that wants to believe that this is a shift in the direction of the game, but the cynic feels like this is an attempt to make players temporarily forget about the bad times.

Then there is the developer in me that realizes that a lot of this is unfair to the team working on the game. Even in my own job there is a long list of things that are relatively quick to wrap up, but never quite get done because there is a prioritized by management list of things that take precedence. This part of me thinks that what we are seeing is probably a combination of two things. Firstly the management is caught off balance and desperately grasping and universally good things that they can pump out quickly, and a lot of these things were probably side-projects of the devs and are now given leave to finally finish them up and get them out into the game. Everyone has a list of items that they know would be really good… but that they can never quite find the time to finish up, and I think folks are being allowed to finally work on these things.

Then there is the other part that is frustrating me right now. I see folks making their way back to Blizzard titles, when in the end… nothing has really changed yet. There have been some high visibility exits from the company, but none of the demands that the Blizzard employees have made have actually been met. To make things worse there is talk of fears over retaliatory firings, which may or may not be a thing but the rumors are there. I am just not personally ready to forgive and forget yet, and I am thankful that I had already made my break from being a “Blizzard Gamer” back in 2011 during Cataclysm. There are folks who were hurting when they were not playing the game, and there are good employees that potentially suffer as subscribership goes down… so I get that this is an extremely complicated issue. However I am just not personally ready to jump back and pretend that everything is okay.

I am frustrated that gamers have extremely short memories. Patch 9.1.5 seems poised to be the gaming equivalent of Calgon, and is fixing to take away all of the memories of bad times… at least temporarily. I guess on one hand I am happy that the folks who are capable of making good with Blizzard and returning are going to have some excellent new toys to play with, but frustrated that I can’t look the other way this time. I miss the hell out of Diablo 3, but I am not ready to come back yet.

Find Your Own Nonsense

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Sometimes the YouTube algorithm is creepily accurate. Over the weekend it decided that I needed to be exposed to a channel called “TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin”. I watch a lot of crafting videos because while I am far too lazy to actually do many of these things, I do daydream about one day following through on some of my real-world ideas. I love toys, more specifically action figures, and big vinyl toys, and apparently, I watched enough crafting videos and toy videos to where they have morphed together into a single entity known as the Crafsman. This channel is presented as a puppet and all of the close-ups of the work is a human wearing a pair of gloves in order to keep the illusion. There was a Q&A video that at one point hinted that the gloves became a thing because the creator was embarrassed by their ashy calloused hands. Whatever the case it is this delightful experience of a mild-mannered relatively child-friendly puppet making awesome crafts.

There are times that you have memories buried so deep inside that you have not thought about them in decades. While watching these videos, it finally hit me like a bolt of lightning why I was bonding with them so heavily. When I was a little kid we would occasionally go visit my Great Aunt and Uncle in Witchita. Next door to him was this super nice old black man named Flip, and I loved Flip so much… even though in truth I realistically spent a very small amount of time with him. The character that the Crafsman plays… reminds me almost exactly of my memories of Flip. The sad thing is I don’t even know what his last name was, but I do know he passed away probably when I was in middle school and I was fairly devastated. It is bizarre how such short encounters can have such formative experiences in your life that are rooted deep enough that they stick around in the background to come bubbling to the surface decades later.

There is a lot of me that wishes I spent more time on physical products. There is a version of me from the past that used to really like to sculpt, and always wanted to create my own action figures. This Crafsman does exactly this and while the videos are extremely entertaining, they also bring forth a lot of easy to understand information. For example this video shows you how you can take a mold and either grow it to increase the size of the casting or shrink it to refine details. I knew my entire life that toy sculptors actually sculpted in a larger format and then shrunk the model down to make the details more tightly packed, but I never understood how that worked until watching this video. The dude reminds me a lot of my own wandering nonsense, because he seems to flit back and forth between a bunch of related disciplines, using whatever he needs in order to get the desired effect.

Speaking of nonsense and side projects, yesterday at some point I realized that I have been informally cataloging my journey since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV in screenshots of my character jobs. I was stuck on a very boring conference call yesterday and I opened up Google Sheets and started tabulating all of the times when I took a picture of the state of my jobs. Looking back through all of my blog posts since returning to the game the weekend of July 4th, I had eleven different data points… twelve including one I took this morning.

I created a spreadsheet with jobs across the top and dates running down and a snap shot of what level I was sitting at which which jobs at a given point. Trying to figure out a way to track growth, I decided to simply add all of these levels together into an aggregate total. It would be way too complicated to track a trendline for each of the jobs and I also lack enough fine granularity between samples to really make something that is reasonable.

When I take all of this data and chart it with a logarithmic axis, you end up with something like this showing the general trendline of my leveling since the first data point on 7/6/2021. Why the hell did I spend time doing this? I have no idea. I mean remember I was manually charting Covid-19 numbers as they were being released on a daily basis, so apparently there is a part of my brain that likes to see how things are progressing and be able to play with the data myself. This isn’t nearly as cool as crafting a figure from scratch and then casting dozens of copies of it… but it is still some of the nonsense that I get up to that is largely only useful to me.

To close out this mornings post, I ran into mister Pine Sternn for the third time last night. This is the first time I have used his name in a post, and is the guy that is willfully choosing to level a bunch of classes without ever turning them into jobs. It was a few minutes into the run when he recognized my name, I was waiting to see if he would remember me. I guess I have reached a point of peace with this aberration because it is something he is doing on purpose and not just because he doesn’t know better. He has a number of jobs, just more that have never finished the quests needed to get the job crystal. My theory is still that he has been no-lifing the Deep Dungeon systems and simply has not taken the time to pop out and do the job quests and at some point in the future these will all end up as their proper jobs. For the time being however it seems like he is making the most of his nonsense.

The thing is… just like Craftsman and my stupid charting of things no one cares about but me… leveling a bunch of classes without ever turning them into Jobs is absolutely related nonsense. Once I realized this… it made me realize that this is probably something that I would have tried. This is no less weird that my self imposed goal of trying to level everything to 80 before Endwalker, when there really is no actual NEED to do this. So I guess my advice is find whatever nonsense makes you happy and stick to it, because life is too short to worry about what appears to be normal.