Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Slideshow of Atrocities

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Morning friends. I have been playing an excessive amount of Outriders over the last few days. I started the game a bit late but have been picking up pace, largely as the story has grabbed me. At this point I am sitting at level 27 of 30 and I believe that I am nearing the end of the main story. The game could of course throw me a monkey wrench at the end but it seems like I have more or less reached the end of the map and also nearing the source of the signal. I would have kept pushing forward last night but I effectively ran out of time and had to be up and around fairly early this morning.

There are a lot of times someone will say a game has “Adult Themes” and what they mean by that is an extreme amount of sexualization. However there is another side of that coin, and that is the side that Outriders lands on. This game deals with the horrors that humanity can enact upon itself and is a slide show of our base instincts. In many ways it reminds me of the early days of The Walking Dead, back when the show still had a point. We have this clear mission… to venture forth into the unknown and find a signal that has been broadcasting since humanity reached planetfall. On this journey a lot of bad things happen and some of them will feel like a sucker punch… and others will feel futile and pointless.

In a game like Diablo 3, each act of the game has a base of operations where all of the infrastructure required to play the game exists. In Outriders this “camp” travels with you as you move across the map. The central conceit is that you have one of the only vehicles that is “analog” enough to withstand the electrical interference brought on by the anomaly. Each time you stop in a new area you set up a base camp until it is time to move the vehicle forward again. This is a bit of weird concept to get used to because, each of these areas ultimately represents a sub-region with its own travel system and then to traverse the larger world map it requires you to pack up camp and move the vehicle again.

Along the way you gather up a group of companions that will end up being more permanent fixtures in the story. I wasn’t sure what I would think about them but I have grown to love them all in their own way. In a lot of ways Outriders feels like an alternate universe versions of Mass Effect Andromeda. Both games have a similar focus on exploring new regions and finding a new home for humanity. In Andromeda a lot of things go wrong… but in Outriders every conceivable thing goes wrong and ends up with humanity mired in an endless war for decades over the few resources that are left. This isn’t high minded exploration… this is slow trench warfare fought in inches not miles.

One of the big things leading up to the launch of the game were all the farming that folks did in order to try and amass a vault full of legendary weapons. I feel like this was largely futile because upgrading legendary and even epic quality weapons is a losing battle. I tried for a bit to keep upgrading the weapon on the far right because it is by far my favorite item I have gotten in the game. The combination of perks was just amazing… and I have held onto it hoping that some day the resources will be plentiful enough to push it all the way to the level cap. The legendaries however… I am mostly holding onto them for deconstruction fodder in order to learn the mods they contain.

These instead are my workhorses that I have carried forward in the game. The sub machinegun I found as a random drop that just happened to have burning bullets… which are extremely powerful. The second is one of the preorder weapons and in both cases I have leveled them forward each time I dinged and was able to push them up one more level. Thankfully I have managed to maintain a good stash of resources and have been able to pull up my gear one level at a time as I progressed through the game. You can effectively do this with blues… but the purples I get I just vault for later deconstruction whenever they cease being useful.

In many ways Outriders is the strange mutant child of Destiny and Diablo 3 and because of that it is directly in my wheelhouse. I really enjoy the gameplay of Devastator with its up close and personal… kill all the things to heal style of interactions. I look forward to seeing what the further gameplay is like once I have finished the main story and capped my character out at thirty. I know at some point I will have to start leveling up my world rank again, but I am largely focused on doing that once I have hit cap. Similarly there are a lot of hunts that I have not partaken in, in part because they seem to reward purple or better items and I wanted to wait until closer to the level cap before doing a lot of these.

It is a really great game, but I still feel like I need to keep warning you… that whatever you think of as a “dark game”, this game is going to keep getting darker. The blend of science fiction and horror reminds me quite a bit of Event Horizon, so that if you were cool with that movie then you might be just fine with this game. Think back through history at some of the greatest atrocities of mankind… and that will also prepare you for the mindset that this game forces you to experience. There are absolutely going to be some folks that just nope out of the game at various points and that is okay. There are moments that make The Division seem cheery. At some point I will do a more holistic overview of the game, but for now I am still engaged and nearing what I think is the end.

Twelve Bleaks out of Ten

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Hey Friends! Like all weekends this one went way the heck too fast. I ended up taking off Friday but a good chunk of that was spent taking my dad to the doctor and running errands. As far as activities this weekend they fall into three distinct buckets. Firstly I managed to finish leveling my Bow Nightblade which is the last of the characters that I was planning on leveling while the buff was active. I am contemplating maybe putting a few of the easily levels on the new Sorcerer Tank experiment, but I am absolutely not going to do the grind all the way to level 50. What I really need to spend the next few weeks doing is burning through all of the treasure maps that I have clogging my inventory and bank from doing the Dark Anchor grind.

I need to spend some time evaluating pricing on the guild store so that I can maybe move some of this stuff more quickly. Right now I have my 30 slots filled and I wish there was a way to be able to sell more items without joining additional trade guilds. I guess it makes sense why folks have more trade guilds than pretty much anything else. On the radar is a return to running content on my main because I still would love to be caught up to the point of being able to start the new expansion fresh in June when it lands. I don’t think there is a shot in hell of that happening however, which again is a me thing… because anyone can start the new content day one. I just have this hang up about wanting to complete content in the order it was released.

Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was working on my nonsense playlist. At the time of writing this I am up to 894 songs for a grand total of 59 hours and 47 minutes of play time. Considering that I am using shuffle and spotify doesn’t seem to play through everything once before repeating… it is highly likely I will actually listen to everything on it but it makes a good radio that brings me joy. I am still periodically adding things to it as I think about them, but I am probably going to start creating some focused “mixtape” playlists and sharing them with you as well. I am not sure if this brand of nonsense is down anyone’s alley, but I am enjoying it.

Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was catching up on Outriders. I attempted to play a bit when it launched but have been otherwise occupied, first with the Diablo 3 Season 23 and later with grinding my Nightblade in Elder Scrolls. The first thing that I did was turn off the thing that keeps increasing your world level because this felt a little weird. My power gained from dropped items was just not keeping up with the difficulty increase and it sorta felt like being dropped into Torment 1 in Diablo 3 before being fully geared. I’ve now set the world level to 3 aka what they call “Normal” and am back to enjoying myself.

I am sure at some point I will write a general review of the game, but one of the bigger takeaways is just how bleak it is. Like I have played some bleak games… but this one is on a whole new level. It seems like so often you meet a character that seems interesting, and then in a very Walking Dead fashion… they callously kill them off with a stray bullet or something else that feels meaningless. I think this is absolutely on purpose to illustrate just how bad of shape the world is, but it does grate on you a bit as you continue to play. I hope that as I keep moving forward I will eventually start to see a glimmer of hope, because right now the straights are much dire.

That is all folks. I hope you have a great week. I seem to have jacked up my sleep patterns and am personally hoping that settles out.

Rediscovering Playlists

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Morning Friends! Now that I have finished the Diablo 3 Season 23 grind, that means I have more or less defaulted back to trying to finish my Nightblade off in Elder Scrolls Online. There are still several more days of the Anniversary Festival and with that the double experience buff that comes from eating cake. I personally find this pretty chill and relaxing to just hop in and join one of the auto groups and grind away until my bags fill. While doing this I have been spending quite a bit of time recently listening to music, which is odd to say that I have not done in a very long time. I have no clue what happened because music used to be such a critical part of my life, but over the years I gravitated more and more towards instrumental music… and then just stopped listening to something in the background all together.

This most recent foray has been thanks to my good friend Bells, which I realize is somewhat confusing given that I go by Bel with one L. She has created a handful of really good playlists that are theme based with the most recent one being centered around the music of Generation X, or at least those of us growing up at a very particular age. Listening to this feels like I transported back to being seventeen again and cruising around in my beat up 1977 Honda Civic Hatchback. If you are interested then I highly suggest this playlist, and I also really enjoy her punk playlist as well.

I admittedly am pretty new to using Spotify, which I know sounds weird given how ubiquitous it has become. I am by no means a stranger to streaming audio, I just went down a different path to arrive here. Originally I was a huge proponent of Pandora, because with the closing of Oink’s Pink Palace I was looking for a new discovery engine more than anything else. I was no longer listening to the radio and with it I needed a new vehicle for discovering new music that I might like. From there I shifted over to Google Music and was there until they started screwing with it and trying to turn it into YouTube Music. After that I had a brief stint with Amazon Music but kept running into gaps in their inventory of songs which lead me to finally subscribe to Spotify.

One of the things that I didn’t love about Google Music was the lack of a way to publicly share a playlist with someone else… and actually allow them to listen to it. This is something that is solved with Spotify and recently I have been working on my own stupidly large playlist. It is far from complete and likely never will be… but if you are so inclined I give you Bel’s Confusing Blend. I highly suggest listening to it on shuffle given that there are large blocks of the same artist right now in a row. It is intended more as a radio station style experience and shuffle mostly does that. I sorta wish I had the ability to pre-shuffle the list and at some point I might actually sort it by hand to make it flow a little better but for now it is what it is.

One of the things that I used to love as a kid is creating mix tapes and I might start doing that again. A mix tape was a specific vehicle where the songs flowed in a specific way as to invoke a particular feeling. I miss doing this and if I can find some of the ones I created in the past for friends, I might port them over, but I have no clue if I saved any of that. I lost most of my musical archives at one point which is ultimately what lead me to embrace streaming. Today is going to be a bit of a busy day, but at least I will have a personal soundtrack to nurture me.

Season 23 Done

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Morning Friends! Yesterday involved a significant number of rounds of bounties because that is ultimately what I needed in order to get Avarice done the predictable way. I took a screenshot of this fully cleared map because it was a bit of a rarity. I talked about this a bit but I am having an issue where I am crashing to desktop rather often while playing Diablo 3 this season. Other friends are reporting the same behavior so I am guessing it has something to do with the sweeping changes that were patched in surrounding followers. This however should be a public service announcement to go ahead and close your bounties and collect the caches because it was very rare that I actually made it through all five zones before getting a crash to desktop.

One of the things with Avarice is that I tend to overfarm significantly because I do not trust my own mathematics. Essentially I have developed this habit of running one full round past when I think I have hit my goal. Effectively I had 40 caches divided between 10 T13 caches and 30 T16 caches. This is way more than I actually needed because if you do the math you end up with something like this:

10 Torment 13 Bounty Caches at 1,190,000 gold each = 11,900,000 gold

30 Torment 16 Bounty Caches at 1,640,000 gold each = 49,200,000 gold

Combined gives me a grand total of 61,100,000 gold

In theory I could have stopped at 25 Torment 16 caches and 10 Torment 13 caches because that would have given me roughly 52 million gold but that was cutting it a little close for my tastes so I went ahead and farmed just one more round. The scary thing is… while I was loading up my inventory with caches to go for the final opening… I crashed to desktop. I did not take a picture of the loot everywhere because I was afraid to do ANYTHING until I had locked down all of that random loot.

Once I got Avarice done, all that was really left was to cube a bunch of legendaries to finish out the achievement for collecting 40 legendary abilities. Ultimately this is always the last thing that I knock out because I will end up with such an overwhelming amount of resources from the bounty caches that it just simply becomes a matter of finding enough items in my vault that I have not already cubed. Thankfully I have a bad habit of just dumping random legendaries in my vault rather than dealing with them as I go so I end up with plenty of fodder for the cube.

At this point you might be asking yourself… why do you do this every season? The answer is simple. It is for the pet. This time around it was an adorable angry kitty person that I could not pass up. For the last several seasons there has been a chase pet that you can only get by finishing the entire season and I love them. Will it matter once Diablo 4 releases and everyone migrates over to that game? Probably not but for now I am enjoying my wide array of gold collecting pet options. Now that the season is effectively over for me I am going to return to Elder Scrolls Online as my daily driver apart from popping back into Diablo 3 to help others with their seasonal journey. I had a lot of fun, because it is this super condensed leveling and grinding process. Then again I always enjoy the seasonal ride.