Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Man on The Moon

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Good Morning Friends! I finished up the quest for the Zephyr last night and while I absolutely hate the design… it is cool to have a stasis element sword. I am not sure what it is about the whole Dawning design ethic, but it is awful. Like I get what they are going for… a sort of new years festival thing that isn’t dominated by either the Red/Green Christmas colors or the Red/Gold Lunar New Year designs. However there is just some about the shapes of the items that I don’t really like that much. I’ve never really cared for the “Nine” themed items either, and these absolutely seem to share a similar design ethic. I kinda wish you could create weapon skins similar to how you can create universal ornaments for armor, so I could just swap this to a weapon I don’t hate.

I am slow rolling my way through leveling my light, or whatever they call it currently. I am old… I will probably never stop calling it light level. Mostly I have been getting in, knocking out a few objectives and then calling it good for the night. I still really enjoy Gambit probably the most of all of the available modes. There is something about its specific blend of elements that I really enjoy greatly. Essentially I am getting daily bounties for Dawning and then trying to figure out who I can accomplish them the easiest. Last night I had Hive and Scorn bounties and thought since you get both of them regularly in gambit… I might be able to kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately I wound up finishing the Hive one on Tangled Shore, and the Scorn one in a Dreaming City Lost Sector. Still having a lot of fun but very much not taking anything seriously.

Back over in Final Fantasy XIV, like I have said a few times I have been purposefully avoiding the login queues by playing other games. However I think either over the next few days or over the weekend I am going to start fighting my way in again. I have some dungeons to run that I have unlocked but never done before, and I think my friend Grace also has them unlocked as well. I figure it might be good shenanigans to run around and do them together and then loop in anyone else in the free company who wants to go along as well given that we have tank and heals covered for easy queues. The above image is not a story spoiler but makes me exceptionally happy because so much of the moon is pulled straight out of my Final Fantasy IV nostalgia.

I did stumble across something pretty cool last night if you are looking for something to watch. There is a multi-part docuseries on YouTube about the origins of the Xbox and the various travails that the console went through during inception as well as various missteps. This is edited in the format of a Netflix multi-part documentary so that it almost feels like something created by No Clip. They even got Laura Bailey to do the narration for the series which makes it feel all the more legit. While watching it you almost forget for a moment how brilliant this piece of marketing actually is. It is absolutely evangelism for the Xbox brand and paints it in the light of being this scrappy “by gamers for gamers” rebel. I was not an Xbox gamer, I jumped straight from Dreamcast to playing PC MMORPGs with a brief revisit in PlayStation 2 land. I do remember my friends getting super into it however and my neighbor across the street being extremely into Halo.

I am on part four right now of what is currently a six part series, and it is just self deprecating enough to feel fair. It would never do anything to paint Microsoft in a bad light, because it is produced from within the bowels of Redmond but it does let down the guard more than a few times in very strategic ways in order to feel like the behind the scenes story. Truth is I know a few people who worked on the original Xbox and this syncs up with some of the stories they had told me. I’ve actually seen one of those original metal Xboxes that they show off in the series in person. However never forget that this is absolutely brilliant marketing. I mean I just bought an Xbox Series X which means it is working, because Game Pass and XCloud really are phenomenal deals and my old school 90s VCR model Xbox One needed and upgrade.

Dawning Time

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I have to admit I had completely forgotten about the Dawning Festival being a thing, or how generally satisfying it is. For those who have not experienced it, this is a weird festival where you shoot bad guys to collect materials… to make deeply questionable sounding cookies. You then hand those cookies into people in the tower and other destinations… for reward packages that include in them a bunch of Dawning specific weapons. It ends up forming this really enjoyable loop of “do some stuff”, “get some stuff”, and then ultimately “get big rewards”. For me who is currently grossly under-geared, it also serves as the impetus to actually be doing some grinding which helps to remedy that situation.

Given my present mental and emotional state, this all seems to fit right now. I know I should be fighting through the FFXIV queue and working on collecting some bookrocks, but that right now seems so cumbersome and instead I shoot some dudes for a candy like explosion of materials. It is about all I can really handle engagement wise at this very moment. I am in a very active clan, but I can’t really bring myself to engage much in that either. I know activities are happening on the regular but the emotional toll of losing Kenzie I am afraid has caused me to slip back into turtle mode. I will dig myself out at a later date but for now I am sorta trying to heal.

I am slowly working on a series of dawning quests, and for right now the only weapon that I have unlocked is the Glacioclasm. I am not the biggest fan of fusion rifles, largely because of the very small ammunition pool. At some point Bungie made a massive quality of life change and made all primary weapons have unlimited ammunition reserves. This means I can just run around effectively forever with “white ammo” weapons and just not care about ammunition at all. This means I am way the hell more likely to use double primary instead of a primary/secondary load-out. I did however use this to knock out a few bounties and the weapon is “fine” but probably not better than my Cartesian Coordinate.

The item I think most of us are seeking is a good role of the new Stasis element sword that was introduced with this event. Slowly but surely I am working my way through that quest and once completed I can purchase packages that give me an increased chance of getting more copies of it to drop. For the moment this all seems to be right down my alley and I am going with it. I’ve not abandoned FFXIV or even New World to be honest… though I am mostly in a holding pattern on the later to see if they pull their head out of their ass. With Final Fantasy XIV I am waiting for queues to die down to rational levels to where I can realistically choose to play the game and get in within thirty minutes instead of needing to play my entire day around it.

Bungie 30th Anniversary

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Hey Friends, I have been struggling to attach to games this week… and honestly last week as well. Having finished Endwalker, I have been purposefully staying away from that game in my small way of trying to help with congestion so that more people can get through it. I get that I am just one person… but if more people took a step away for a bit, more folks would get to experience that great expansion. In the meantime I have been floundering a bit to find new purpose and booted up Destiny 2 on a whim… and it more or less stuck. I think mostly my mental and emotional speed right now is “mindless shootymans game”. It doesn’t hurt that there is a 30th Anniversary event going on in game and with it a bunch of interesting drops.

The best of these for my purposes is the BXR-55 Battler which is essentially a pulse rifle patterned off of the Battle Rifle from Halo. The default load out has it burst firing, but I have slotted in a mod that shifts mine to full auto making it a pretty great primary weapon. What I really dig about this weapon is the accuracy and range and the ability to hip-fire it reliably. Which effectively gives me a single weapon that can be scoped for something akin to a scout rifle for picking off targets at range, or hip-fired to give me something that feels like an auto rifle. I have this sneaking feeling that this is going to eventually get nerfed because it seems to be dominating the meta a the moment.

There are a whole slew of other weapons that are in honor of past Bungie games. If you were more of a Covenant person, you can pick up the Retraced Path which is sort of themed after the Carbine. It also serves as the first legendary quality trace rifle, with the rest of weapons in that category taking up your exotic slot. If the Energy Sword was more your jam, the game has two “half” energy swords that make me wonder if we are eventually going to get an exotic quest to join them into the true Energy Sword equivalent. I never played Marathon because I did not have access to a Mac, but apparently the shotgun that drops is in honor of that game. There is a grenade launcher dropping and I have no clue what it is themed after other than it bears resemblance to the Mountain Top.

The new game mode that drops most of these weapons is called Dares of Eternity and is a weird “game show” hosted by the Starhorse and Xur. Essentially you spin a wheel and this chooses what type of enemy you face during that round. You battle your way through multiple rounds and then face a classic Destiny 1 boss at the very end. There is a scoring system which allows you to complete bounties for the Starhorse, and a more general series of bounties that you can complete for Xur. You win at least one key per round and can also get Strange Coins from doing other activities during the Anniversary Event that you can turn in for more keys or other items. If you unlock enough caches and save up enough keys you can earn things like ships or sparrows as well as I believe a full armor set.

All in all it is some “big dumb fun”, and I think that is what my brain needs right now. There is a new DLC dungeon that I would love to get a group for at some point so I can pick up Gjallarhorn which is tied to completing it. Additionally there is a quest chain that unlocks an exotic sidearm that is based off of the pistol from Halo that I would like to get as well. Mostly I am spending my time doing Dares of Eternity over and over, but I have started knocking out some weekly rewards to try and get my light level up there. It is still not the best system in the world, but after New World I know that it could be so much worse.

Sticking the Landing

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Well folks… once again I try my best to cherry pick a screenshot that doesn’t obviously show anything for a post as I am trying to maintain my stance of not spoiling anything. Yesterday I wrapped up the Endwalker Main Story Quest and let me tell you… it was a ride. With all certainty this is my favorite Final Fantasy XIV expansion and quite possibly my favorite MMORPG expansion of all time. Yesterday I talked a bit about the complicated emotions surrounding that notion, because this is a game that requires you to have lived through all of the hundreds of hours of content from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker to really appreciate the gravity of this situation. Friends… I cried so much last night, enough that my wife suggested that maybe I really shouldn’t be playing this game especially since my baby is still in the hospital right now and that has caused a massive dip in my emotions as well. They were not all bad tears…. and honestly a lot of them were the tears of remembrance and joy that you might have when visiting old friends.

Endwalker is an expansion that does not go anywhere I might have expected it to go. It was an expansion where we knew four of the six total destinations ahead of time, but even then… there were so many revelations as I played through it. The remaining two “secret” destinations really are mind boggling and I am still reeling from the impact of some of the revelations that come from them. If I had a complaint it would only be that the sixth location arrived too late and was a bit too cumbersome to traverse. It played a key role in the story… but after the first interludes it was pretty certain the path before us… and then it just took a long time for it to actually play out along those lines. Essentially the pacing of the final chapter of the game was a bit monotonous for my tastes. That does not mean that the conclusion does not feel earned or meaningful, but those final steps as we got there were a bit cumbersome.

That said I feel like they absolutely “stuck the landing”, and managed to drive home the actual final moments of the expansion. More important than the journey I just completed… I have so much hope for where we are going next. The game does a great job of teasing just how little of the world we actually know anything about and how many of the reflections we have yet to visit. I am extremely interested to see the next story and how it evolves over the course of this expansion and its patches. The only thing that I don’t fully know is the shape of the post patch content, because it honestly feels like we have tied up most of the loose ends associated with the “Ascian” storyline. In the past there has always been a dangling thread here or there that could be tugged upon, and we are really lacking that. I do wonder if they will spend the .1 through .55 patch really devoting it entirely to setting up the next conflict, instead of breaking that into an epilogue and prologue like they have done before.

Now we tread into some light spoiler territory, but Endwalker is an expansion that has made me care about every single character save one. I do not get Zenos existing past Stormblood in the Final Fantasy XIV franchise. I am uncertain if this character is just super beloved in Japan or something, but it is without a doubt the worst creation to come out of the Final Fantasy franchise. Even Kefka has more depth and he is just a murderous clown. Zenos being too painfully bored to care about anything is not interesting, and I feel like the fact that he had anything to do with Endwalker and Shadowbringers for that matter is a waste of screen time. My spoiler is this… they never manage to do anything interesting with Zenos and he is STILL the worst character. Even Fandaniel they manage to make me care about and add some depth to that character, but Zenos remains a one note tune that just has cool armor and weapons.

Now I find myself terribly torn. I want to start working on the endgame, and want to start leveling additional characters… but I also sorta feel bad in doing so because maybe I should back the fuck out for awhile and let someone else have my slot. I did what I felt like I needed to do… I completed the storyline and now have experienced that emotional roller coaster. Now I want to make sure all of my friends have experienced it so that we can have the big spoiler show about it. The problem is… it isn’t like I can actually give my spot in the line to someone else. So I am in this weird territory where it almost feels like it is my duty to stop playing for awhile until everyone has caught up… but also I don’t want to. We will see how the weekend goes and I guess I am thankful that Kenzie being hospitalized has at least allowed me to stop trying to nursemaid her constantly so that I could finish things up.

Endwalker and its story has really been a godsend the last few days, and has kept my mind off the constant worry over my baby girl. There isn’t much that I can do right now and I have to have faith that the doctors are doing what they can while she is hospitalized. They are under Covid protocols still and it isn’t like I can even go see her right now. I am getting calls from the Vet a few times a day with status updates and things are still pretty touch and go. She is improving and starting to act more like herself but she is very much not out of the woods yet. Essentially they are fighting to stabilize her blood sugar while at the same time trying to control negative reactions happening in her pancreas and liver while also fighting a bladder infection that they feel probably triggered the entire cascade reaction. I talked to the Vet three times yesterday and the first one was pretty grim, but as he progressed through the day he got more hopeful in his voice. Essentially his focus is to get her well enough to come home, so that she can rest in her familiar environment and heal faster as such. In theory that should happen at some point this weekend. So I greatly appreciate all the thoughts and prayers I have gotten for Kenzie butt, and here is hoping everything continues to go in the right direction.