Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Hype, Cynicism, and Concern

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Accounts all Happy and LInked Up

First up this morning I am going to talk a bit about Bungie account linking and the Battle.net to Steam transfer process. Largely I am going through the motions here just in case someone out there has not been following the news related to Destiny 2 for some time. Bungie is divorcing Activision and part of the terms of the divorce is that they will be moving the PC version of Destiny 2 away from Activision Blizzard owned Battle.net. The new partner for account information will be Steam, a thing we all pretty much already have. However the data from Battle.net needs to be linked up and copied to your Steam account.

As a result yesterday they opened up the process for doing this. I tweeted out the link yesterday but you need to go to Bungie.net and use the PC Move tool. Effectively this will walk you through the process of logging into a Battle.net account, verifying your characters and such that are owned by that account, logging in a Steam account, and finally verifying that everything is appearing on the Steam entitlement screen. It took me a few minutes and now Steam shows up in the list of accounts that I have linked. The truth is I am largely okay with this move because the integration with Battle.net never worked quite as smoothly as I would have liked it to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MspAKr8THf4

Next up in the “things I think are cool” department. With Gamescom comes a bunch of new trailers, and this time we have one for Shadowkeep showing off the finisher moves. This is something new going into Destiny 2 and seem to be similar to the finishing moves in Doom 2016. Essentially when an enemy gets low enough you can perform a special melee attack with its own unique animation and punch/kick/whatever the monster to death. The bad bit is that the cosmetic versions of these will be Eververse exclusive, but the mods you can associate with them that do things like spawn heavy ammo will be gained through gameplay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8mC5GaDoyQ

Next up we got a trailer for the first post-Shadowkeep Season, this time seemingly focused on the Vex and the Black Garden. I still think the Vex are one of the cooler enemies we fight, and I’ve always thought it cool that the radiolarian fluid that you see come out of them when you kill one is a sentient hive being of a sort. There are some rumors floating around as to why we are going back to the Black Garden, but in truth I don’t really care. I am just happy to see Bungie slowly clawing back locations that only appeared in Destiny 1 and putting them in Destiny 2. Next step… I want to see them simply recreate the Destiny 1 experience inside of Destiny 2 and rebrand the whole thing to simply being “Destiny”.

The other day I posted what was largely a throwaway tweet while watching part of the Gamescom Xbox show. It featured some of the most hyperbolic pitch folks I have ever seen, that were fake levels of excitement about every little thing that was being announced. That level of forced hype really is a turn off, which is sad because once I was able to get past that there were a bunch of cool things that they talked about. So I find myself wondering… how did I get into this state where I almost feel allergic to hype? E3 2019 was largely a disappointment, and what I have seen from Gamescom could be thrown in a similar category.

Is it just that I am gunshy from being burned so many times? I mean I poured my heart in soul into Anthem and largely found a really great game… but one that stopped being great after you burned through the initial story-line. That said I think the Anthem reveal at E3 several years back was the last time I was fully on board with a staged demo selling me on the notion of what the game might be like. It might just be that I have reached a point where I am skeptical about anything that is being announced, because while I lead this off with talk about Destiny 2 and the fact that it is in a pretty great place… it has taken them three years of ups and downs to get to that place.

I think a whole other side of this is just the sheer concern of not knowing where I will find the time to play even half of the things that I am vaguely interested in. I already feel like I have a crushing back log pushing down on me of games that I really feel like I should be playing for various reasons. Then just looking ahead I have no clue how I am going to navigate all of the release dates. I just assembled this quick list which is in no way complete… but represents some of the bullet points on my radar for the rest of 2019.

  • World of Warcraft Classic – August 27th
  • Monster Hunter World Iceborne – September 6th
  • Borderlands 3 – September 13th
  • Destiny 2 Shadowkeep / Season of the Undying – October 1st
  • The Outer Worlds – October 25th
  • Death Stranding – November 8th
  • Jedi Fallen Order – November 15th
  • Pokemon Sword and Shield November 15th
  • Doom Eternal – November 22nd

There is a part of me that wonders if my challenge getting hyped about things coming down the pipe is a defense mechanism seeing as I know that I don’t have time to play all of the things I already want to play, and then for the rest of the year at a minimum of every other week something new is being released that I also really want to play. I have no clue how I am going to juggle all of this, and as a result I am just wondering if my brain is throwing up blinders and screaming at me that enough is enough.

The level of excitement that I feel however seems to be hampered as well. Like yesterday I wrote about my love of Black Isle/Obsidian and everything I have seen about The Other Worlds seems like a return to the best of what I love from them… Fallout New Vegas. However I am finding it really challenging to muster more than a mild sense of excitement about it. My brain is stuck in a mode where I am trying to figure out how I will juggle my schedule to find the time to really devote a weekend or two to exploring it.

Maybe I am just broken. Whatever the case though I really don’t want my ramblings to harsh the excitement someone else is feeling about it. My twitter comment really was meant as a sort of throwaway reaction, but maybe I need to watch those more closely. I don’t want to come off as a bitter old man, but maybe on some level that is what I am? It sucks. I want to feel child like joy when I watch a games presentation again. I miss having E3 or BlizzCon or any other major show to feel like Christmas morning.

Optimizing out Communication

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The first time I saw the Dwarven Statues in Loch Modan

A few days ago a conversation started on twitter, initially between myself and Heart1lly but expanded outwards from there. What originally started as a discussion about World of Warcraft Classic also similarly expanded out to cover the golden age of MMORPGs in general. Now that I am staring at the calendar and see that I will be playing a “Classic-zed” version of World of Warcraft in thirteen days, I find myself mulling over it some more. I find myself extremely excited by the possibilities it might present. This morning rather than posting pictures from the modern classic client, I have dug through my archives and am digging out a bunch of 4:3 aspect ratio screenshots from my early years in the game.

The day I got my very first mount in World of Warcraft

I’ve written about this before, but largely I think when it comes to video game nostalgia especially surrounding an online game, we are less nostalgic about the game itself and more nostalgic about a certain set of circumstances from a certain moment in time. I think much of the draw of the nostalgic is that we know at some level that we can never again arrive back at that moment and have those same feelings, because the world has changed and we have changed with it. However it feels good from time to time to try and retread the steps we have passed before, and as I age I find myself doing this a bit more often. I regularly reinstall aging game clients just to experience for a moment the glimmer of the joy I once had playing them.

My good friend Vernie dancing on boxes in Stathholme I believe one of the first times I was in there.

Sure we should be out there making new memories, but I feel like the modern crop of MMORPGs actively hampers that ability. The first MMOs worked and created the lasting relationships that they did in part because we had a serious need for other people. What I mean by that is that in order for us to have a fun night, we needed a bunch of other people to be similarly interested in doing the same thing. This meant that without really meaning it… you yourself were open to doing things that were maybe less than optimal for your evening because it would mean that in turn the other player would be willing to assisting you at a later date. I cannot count the number of Paladin and Warlock mounts that I helped people get, knowing that it was a really important achievement for them and that at least on some level I was accruing social capital that could be spent on my own desires.

The original “Warrior Protest” on Argent Dawn… aka the dancing naked gnomes in Ironforge moment

When I say lasting relationships were formed, a good number of the bonds with gamers that I talk to on a semi-daily basis were forged during this era. It was a shared sense of struggle that lead us all to bond over so many nights in Dire Maul or Lower Blackrock Spire… or eventually Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. The majority of the folks that I record AggroChat with on a weekly basis have roots that tie back to the time we spent in World of Warcraft on the Argent Dawn server. These are life long friends that moved past just the game. I’ve helped people prepare their first resume, or proof read a term paper in college, or even in the case of Rae hired for one of my development positions.

A warband waiting for reports back from scouts before moving in the infamous Southshore/Tarren Mill open PVP

There is no denying that MMORPGs have become significantly more convenient for the players, but I think that convenience has been a double edged sword. Last night I found myself queuing for a dungeon in FFXIV without even asking in guild chat if someone wanted to ride along for the fast tank queue. Why did I do this? Because waiting on another player is inconvenient and I now live in a time where I no longer have to get myself messy with human communication. I feel bad that my brain sometimes thinks in that manner, but there are a lot of times we can live in our own little bubble and are presented a series of nameless faceless and often time voiceless individuals in our group that we don’t need to communicate with.

Our first outing as a guild to Scarlet Monastery… we tanked it with hunter pets.

The rough edges have been smoothed to the point where a dungeon run is a series of encounters that are messaged so well as to not need any form of communication. With Shadowbringers, Final Fantasy XIV introduced the Trust system, which allows you to run dungeons with a full party of NPCs. The funny thing about it, is that running with a trust feels no different now than running an Expert Roulette with a full group of human beings. In fact the NPCs talk way more in a party than the humans that are there with me all barreling towards a fixed goal that we all have memorized by this point. I present that again… this has all come through the fact that we no longer need to communicate to play these games.

Hanging with my friend Amy on her rogue Ricci after killing The Beast in UBRS

Now I am not naive enough to think that a return to World of Warcraft Classic is going to magically usher in the golden age of MMORPGs again. However I am looking forward to needing other players, because even for me… who is generally thought of as a community organizer… I occasionally need a reminder that the other people matter. The Dungeon Finder opened the game to a lot of people who lacked the social network to be able to form groups, and because of this you will find a lot of proponents. For me, it was the death of social gaming in World of Warcraft, because rapidly these thriving social channels that we used each night for grouping went silent. Why say into a channel “Tank and Healer looking for dps for dungeon” when you can just push a button and get a group assigned to you.

Doing the Stormwind step of the Onyxia quest on Belghast

The problem with push button grouping is accountability goes out the window. I think a lot of the toxic behavior that we see in gaming as a whole is due to the fact that there are generally no consequences attached to it. During the pre-dungeon-finder society in World of Warcraft, your actions and ultimately your reputation mattered. As a guild and raid leader I was in communication with the leaders of most of the other raids and guilds on our server. We had a situation happen on a raid where someone rolled need on a pair of BoE boots, and then at the end of the raid that player informed us that he was leaving the raid and going elsewhere. Within moments of the raid being over the BoE boots were up on the auction house.

All hunter Upper Blackrock Spire run back when you could get 10 players in there

This was a pretty uncool move, and I mentioned it in passing to the leader of the raid that the player was going to as a warning. Within a few minutes of conversation among various guild and raid leaders I found myself in tells with the player. The unintended consequence of his actions was that he was finding himself kicked from that new raid and barred from all of the other raids that he could have gone to. He was begging me to call of something that I didn’t even ask for in the first place. Raid leaders hate mercenaries, and effectively his behavior was something that none of the other raids wanted any part of either. When you needed other people, and you were limited to the scope of your own server… prior to the existence of server transfers… your reputation as an honorable player was way more important than the gear you happened to be wearing.

The line of players preparing to storm the whelp room in Blackwing Lair

So in truth I figure most of the people that we are dragging into World of Warcraft Classic will bounce within the first few weeks. However there is a part of me that is hoping it will serve to rekindle a server community surrounding the game that brings back some of the things that I remember from my past. I want social channels to matter again, and the dark art of forming a group to be a thing. I want to meet new people and bolster that list of life long friends that I have met through gaming. Right now the only people I really meet are through Social Media or introduced to me by friends of people I already know through gaming. The problem there is that on many levels these are just surface friendships because at no point in our gaming do either of us actually truly need the other player.

One of our first Karazhan raids

The strongest friendships are forged in the fires of shared adversity. In order to have that adversity the game needs a significant amount of friction pushing back against you on a nightly basis, and the modern MMORPG lacks that apart from the most hardcore of activities. Sure were we Savage or Mythic raiders we would have the same tales to tell, but I just don’t have the appetite for raiding that I once did. I want the simple moment to moment game-play to matter and with this I am looking forward to hanging out with people in a re-imagined World of Warcraft. I am trying to go into it with open eyes about the slim chance that it acts as a catalyst to bring about the styles of gameplay that I find myself missing. So while I am not going into this with rose colored lenses I am hopeful nonetheless.

Two Goals Down

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Destiny 2 – PC

The first goal of the night was to finish up my purple armor set for the Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. Over the weekend I had knocked out everything but the EAZ minibosses component, and I largely stopped there because I knew given yesterdays patch the requirement was being lowered to 50. I was sitting at 56 so my hope was that it would be as simple as logging in, equipping all of the gear and meditating in front of the statue.

What I did not expect was that all of the gear would be 750, which was a nice boost in item level. I just need to get some powerful items to bump things up on the weapon front to 750 as well. The funny thing is… I will probably be farming EAZ over the next few weeks to try and get slightly better perks on each of the armor slots. As it stands the Helm is ideal for the way I play, but all of the other items could use some work. I opened the rest of the boxes I had in my inventory and picked up four additional pieces of the purple majestic armor.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

With the first goal knocked out quickly, I moved on to the second goal of the night which was getting the last little bit of a level on the Samurai and hitting 80. I opted for the short queue of a Trials roulette and got quite possibly the easiest option: Cape Westwind. It legitimately takes longer for the new player to watch the cutscene than it does to kill the boss, so we hung out chatting while waiting on the fight to start. Upon dinging 80 I equipped whatever gear I happened to have available and managed to get my item level up to 425.

From there I picked back up with the 74 Physical DPS Role quest, thinking the easiest and fastest way to gear would be completing the quest and getting the 430 gear from the smithy. It took some time though to chew through the remaining 74, 76, 78 and 80 quests so this consumed the majority of my play time last night. However I have now unlocked a second role and have access to physical dps gear. I wound up buying the 450 crafted blade, so I am now sitting at 435 which is enough to be able to dps Eden. Now that I am getting back into the swing of tanking a roulette or two each night, I should be able to bolster that level with tomestone gear.

World of Warcraft – PC

Finally I spent the last hour or so catching up on the War Campaign quest series given that it appears to be the most coherent manner to catch up on story. I think I underestimated just how much story content had gone into the game since I left, because I keep chewing away at it and seem to be not actually making any headway. I started last night queuing for the pieced of the raid finder that involves the Jaina battle seeing as I needed that for the War Campaign. That was a fun fight overall, but I am not sure how I would feel about the middle section where as horde we are forced to fight Rastakhan? I like Rastakhan a lot.

I think for the forseeable future I will be poking my way along these three different paths of catching up on World of Warcraft in getting back into the swing of the game prior to the launch of Classic. Then working on various objectives in Destiny 2 and probably leveling a healer in Final Fantasy XIV. It has been enjoyable to play for an hour or so and then swap to something fresh and new. It has also been nice hanging out and talking to my friends in Facepull once again.

Fourth Time’s a Charm

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Praetorium or Bust Apparently

I talked about Main Story Roulette some time back and it being one of the best ways to casually level a character. Last night I encountered the problem with this system, and weirdly one I had not encountered at any point prior in the process of pushing the Samurai to 80. The challenge is that when you queue for MSQ Roulette you are ultimately hoping to get Praetorium, because it is worth a significantly larger chunk of experience than the other option Castrum Meridianum. I’ve managed to pull Praetorium more times than not, and as a result when Castrum comes up I curse my fate… but largely play along nicely.

Apparently I hit a streak of people who are not willing to waste their daily bonus on Castrum. It took me roughly fifteen minutes to get through the queue each time, and when I got the first group within seconds all but four of us had bailed on Castrum. You can’t really run the place with four players reliably so I bailed as well and re-queued. Another fifteen minutes later I drew Castrum once again… and this time one of the two tanks refused to move until someone dropped from the party. Again once one person left there was a cascade of leaves until I opted to bail rather than run it down over half of the people.

A third time I sat through the queue and a third time I drew Castrum… and once again before I had even loaded in fully we were down a handful of people. The problem there is that no one queues for MSQ Roulette with the party in progress box checked. There is no reason to do this given that you would in theory be missing out on a bunch of experience that comes from the various boss kills. Again I returned to the queue a fourth time and finally this time it was Praetorium and everyone happily powered their way through it.

Unfortunately that does not stop the fact that Square has a problem on their hands, where a Roulette can produce one of two results and one of them is so disliked that folks are willing to take the 10 minute debuff that keeps them from queuing rather than deal with wasting their bonus on it. In theory they should probably buff Castrum to be able to reward the same amount of experience that Praetorium does. However if they do that… it will swing the balance in the other direction given that Castrum takes about half as long to run as Praetorium. There aren’t any great answers to this conundrum, but seeing as I encountered it three times in a row last night… it is a problem.

Belghast the Undead Warrior on Bloodsail Buccaneers NA-PVE RP server

The other thing that I took care of last night was reserving my character names on Bloodsail Buccaneers the PVE RP server that we plan on rolling on. As a result Belghast the Undead Warrior now exists there and is ready to start leveling when the gates open later this month. I also reserved a Belghast on Mankrik as a back up, but I doubt I will be using it. I don’t have a lot to say on this point other than the fact that if you are wanting names, you might want to log in and do this thing yourself. Several of my friends have already missed out on their chosen character names which is frustrating.

It seems as though I have steered a good number of my Horde side guild Facepull towards this server as well. So in theory we should have a decent number of people around at launch. Largely I just want to be able to field guild groups for dungeons and such. I fully expect to be running a bunch of Ragefire and Wailing Caverns. The only negative about playing a Forsaken is that they are so far away from everything. However the pull of having a second fear break is too great not to roll Undead.