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Regularly Playing: March 2021 Edition

March 31, 2021 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I was realizing this morning just how completely out of date my blog side bar is when it comes to the games that I have been playing regularly. In theory I claim that this is my semi-monthly process of trueing up the sidebar so it represents the sorts of games that I am playing. What actually happens is that I go for large blocks of time without updating this and when that happens massive swings occur. For example the last one of these that I did was in October of 2020 and some stuff has changed. So here goes an attempt at maybe doing these regularly again for a bit. For those not already indoctrinated into the process I divide things up into a few categories:

To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

To Those Remaining

My sweet sweet Diablo 3, you are rarely ever gone from this list. There is even a new season starting this Friday and I am looking forward to going through the routine of the seasonal grind. This season has a bunch of changes to the game and as a result they sorta gave us a greatest hits collection of sets available through Haedrigs Gift. As a result I am looking at probably starting a Whirlrend Barbarian for this season because those are so stinking fun to play.

I am going to be honest, I am leaving this one on the list more as an aspirational placement than a game I am truly actively playing. I boot it up from time to time and play through a few encounters and then put it to bed for a longer period of time. I hope to get back in and play it more intently because also while we have been spilling truth… I feel a little guilty that I am not really doing much with my PlayStation 5.

This one retains its spot because it is still probably my go to “playing switch from bed” game. The pattern of play just fits spending a few minutes before falling asleep. I am not terribly good at it but I enjoy it mechanically and thematically. This is the only game I have played where I enjoy losing, because it means I am going to get some more story beats.

I am leaving this on the list for reasons of which I am contractually not at liberty to talk about. It comes out in August officially and I am looking forward to that release. I’ve never seen a game that has gone through quite so many changes during its late development cycle as this one. It is going to be interesting to see the state of this game at launch. I have quite a bit of faith in it.

Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, RG350, Retroid, Raspberry Pi 4

Still very much spending a chunk of my time playing games that I grew up with… that are now referred to as Retro games. Still feels really weird to be calling them Retro to be honest. Actually yesterday I literally just got an 8 gb Raspberry Pi 4 model in that I am going to be playing with. That is probably going to become my main emulation device for the short term for anything other than higher end stuff like Cemu that absolutely requires the power of my gaming PC.

To The New and Returning

Putting this one back on the list because I am technically playing it again. I am nowhere near as engaged with it as I would like to be and I am not exactly certain why that is the case. From all accounts this is a really good season but I find myself just unable to get stuck into it very deeply. Since we are trueing things up it is in somewhat regular rotation so it is going to get a spot on the list.

I am experiencing a massive renaissance of Elder Scrolls Online and it has rapidly become my primary game over the past month. While I am mostly leveling alts right now, I am going to return to the normal course of trying to quest my way through all of the content in the game and maybe just maybe be ready for the launch of the next expansion in June. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing because I have to make it through large blocks of content and I know I will become distracted by other games that spring up along the way.

Another thing that happened since my previous update is that I have returned to Minecraft in a huge way. I spent a lot of time playing solo and even recorded a semi-daily YouTube series on my adventures. Now however I spend my time either popping between my own private Realms world or a closed server run by my friend Zeli. Not playing near as much as I was but I am still popping in and wandering around. There is a stronghold in the nether that I am clearing and trying to set up a dual blaze farm right now so I still have projects that I am plugging away at. Right now I am likely going to wait to re-engage heavily until the new caves update comes out and create a brand new world.

Outriders is the new looter shooter hotness that is shipping tomorrow officially. I played the hell out of the demo and now am looking forward to consuming this game peacefully. I am not really planning on playing it as my primary game because I am super engaged with Elder Scrolls right now, but I am absolutely going to slow grind it. The launch time is just really bad because it overlaps with a bunch of other things going on like the launch of a new Diablo 3 season.

Valheim is freaking great. If you do not already own this game you should pick it up because it is dirt cheap and one hell of a lot of fun. I’ve reached a point of equilibrium with this game at least until new content ships. I had been playing regularly on a server but I have mostly been playing lately on my solo world. When the hearth and home update ships, I might start a new world depending on how deep the changes go. I will likely always keep Beltopia around given that it is set up nicely for crafting and such.

To Those Departing

I have no real idea why I bounced the way that I have from this game. I think partially it might just be that I don’t love “maintenance gaming” where all I am really doing is dailies. However in this game that isn’t even true because they have released a ton of story content since I last played and I never can quite bring myself to come back and play it. There are a lot of things about this game that work so well and then a lot of things that just frustrate me. For example the fact that I feel like I don’t have a reasonable manner in which to level new characters and catch them up to my core party… means that I largely feel like I am stuck always using my core party. Maybe at some point I will return when it ships on the Switch but for now it is a distant memory.

Shadowlands is a bad expansion filled with systems that I am not interested in engaging with. In fact I would probably say that Shadowlands is going to be up there with the worst expansions of all time. I talked about how frustrated I was with Battle for Azeroth, but at least that is an expansion that I actively enjoyed the leveling process. Shadowlands I barely made it to the level cap with one of my characters and couldn’t even manage to stomach a single zone on my alts. I am not exactly sure how things went off the rails in the manner that they did but for now at least I am done with the game. Like I have not talked about it a lot because in truth I am not even sure it is worth talking about it. I miss hanging out with my friends who play the game but I miss nothing about Shadowlands.

Ships Passing in the Night

Unlike most of the internet I have nothing but love for this game. I apparently had a sufficient system to play it and lucked out on not encountering many bugs during my play through. As such I am actively craving more content for it, but throwing it on the “ships” list because I have more or less put the game aside for the moment. When DLC releases I will either play through the DLC on my current play through or start a brand new campaign. I hope the issues surrounding this game do not kill this franchise because I loved it deeply on so many different levels.

Dragon Age Inquisition was one of those games that I had bounced off of so many times in the past and then suddenly was able to play happily. I have found with the hustle and bustle of the end of the year… I crave deep single player experiences. This is one of those games that I played during that period and had a blast. Looking forward to this story continuing.

When this game first released I tried playing it with a controller because it seemed like that was the proper way to play it. I bounced because the game is not terribly good at explaining when you should leave a planet. However over the holiday break I returned to the game and had a blast, this time playing with my more native control scheme of keyboard and mouse. Truly great game and great experience. If you have not played this game you really owe it to yourself to do so, especially if you like Star Wars even in the least bit.

Another game that I have bounced off numerous times is Knights of the Old Republic 2 and for some reason over this break I managed to make my way through it. Like the game is a mess… there is no getting around that but it is a mess that I am happy to have experienced. There is a lot of interesting things going on in this game and knowing now that this released before Fallout New Vegas I can see some of the things that they expanded upon later and made work better in that game. Would I recommend it to someone else? Probably not, but I am still very happy to have experienced it myself.

Summary

The funny thing about this is that I just realized upon writing out this post… that my sidebar was never actually updated from the October edition meaning it was even more out of date than I realized. Now I will hopefully remember to do the thing and actually make the updates once I finish with this post. Here is to also maybe doing this at least once a quarter going forward… if not monthly.

A Schedule of Play

March 11, 2021 by Belghast

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time hanging out in Elder Scrolls Online and talking with my friend Clockwork Bells or Bells as I tend to refer to her more often than not. I realize it is probably confusing given that I am most often known as Bel but I assure you that Bells is a completely different human being that is legitimate and not someone I just made up to entertain myself. Somehow we ended up getting on this kick of talking about the games coming out and release dates and it made me realize just how much of my year is already spoken for. In January I did a post looking forward into the year but at that point a lot of the dates were not necessarily set in stone. This morning I thought I would refresh that post and talk about some of the dates of specific things that I know I am going to be playing.

Outriders – April 1st

On February 25th we got our hands on a demo of this game and I am super engaged with it. I like its particular brand of run and gun looter shooter nonsense combined with a very Diablo 3 style build system. I am fully on board with this game and looking forward to the release date on April 1st. I think the demo was a pretty great call because this is one of those situations where a game is launching into a genre that has some pretty tarnished history with games like Avengers, Godfall and now the mostly cancelled Anthem. Putting a demo out there shows that they were confident in their product enough to let us start playing it ahead of time. The cherry on the top however is that some progress will be carrying over, but I have not gone grind happy like so many have because I don’t want to wear the game out before it even launches.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition – May 14th

I love Mass Effect and over the course of the years since its release I have played through it a number of times. I cannot believe how absolutely giddy I am about the prospect of playing through it once more, but this time with improved graphics and hopefully improved interface on the game that needs it the most… Mass Effect 1. Over the weekend I talked about comfort gaming and how often I revisit good experiences from the past as a way of salving mental wounds of the present, and experiencing Mass Effect all over again with fresh visuals is going to be one hell of a nostalgia trip. I pretty much expect to be doing nothing but playing this when it launches until I have exited the other end and am watching the credits roll on the third game.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood – June 1st

I’ve said this before, but right now I am having this renaissance with Elder Scrolls Online and on June 1st the next major chapter of the story is released with a whole slew of new content and a new zone. That said I am so far behind that I doubt I will actually be caught up by then, but I am going to make an attempt to at least get a little closer to being caught up. If nothing else I am sure there will be some trickle down effect that impacts me and my enjoyment of the game when this batch of content launches.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart – June 11th

This is finally one of the reasons why I actually bought a PlayStation 5 and it is coming out like six months after that purchase. I am hoping for the sake of many that by the time we hit this point in the year that it becomes a little bit more reasonable get a console. I am a huge fan of Ratchet and Clank and I am super looking forward to Rift Apart. Like this is a different sort of experience than playing a “forever game” like so many on the list. Similarly the Elder Scrolls experience is different than a traditional expansion launch because I am effectively at end game gear and have been for years now. So there shouldn’t be much of a conflict of poking my head into this game and playing the hell out of it.

New World – August 31st

This is another game that I am super on board with and looking forward to playing. If you too got caught up in the whole madness of Valheim, then I highly suggest you also put this game on your radar. While it doesn’t have the really cool building elements, it does have a lot of the same exploratory and resource gathering concepts. I played this game last year for the first time and fell in love and have been anxiously waiting to get my hands on it legitimately. There is part of me that wishes it had just launched last year as planned, but I know the game that exists today will be better received than the first version that I played. I am not at all into PVP and this game has so much PVE meat on its bones that I think it will keep most traditional MMO players happy.

The Plan So Far

That friends is pretty much all that I know that has a proper release date. There are lots more games that I am interested in, but for now this seems to be the tentative schedule that I am looking at as I progress into the year. Other bits of information that we know are the fact that Diablo 4 will not be coming out this year at all and it is starting to look like Vampire Bloodlines 2 won’t be either. I am certain whenever Horizon Zero Dawn Forbidden West comes out that it is going to take up prime gaming real estate. Currently Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis is also slotted for release which I expect will get on this list at some point as well. Right now there is a big gap that is the month of July and most of August but honestly I would probably be perfectly happy just to keep plugging away at Elder Scrolls Online pending we still have a presence in that game.

I’ve never really done this sort of thing, actually tried to plot the course game wise through the year. We will see if in the end my year actually does look anything like this since I am very easily distracted.

KOTOR2 is an Interesting Mess

February 4, 2021 by Belghast

This is going to be a screenshot free post because I never could sort out how to actually take screenshots successfully with Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. I ultimately had to disable the Steam Overlay because it would cause me to lose access to the mouse randomly. If I took a screenshot with ShareX I would generally get either a black screen or the most recent loading or UI screen and not actually what was up on screen at the time when I pushed the button. I broke out some of my older screenshot options like DXTory and Fraps and they were similarly oblivious to the existence of this game. I even attempted to enable the in game screenshot functionality by editing the ini file and that did nothing either. This whole sequence is an allegory for what it is like to play Knights of the Old Republic II.

Yesterday I finished of KOTOR2 and I have to say it left me with one of the least satisfying endings I have experienced in awhile. Before anyone asks I did in fact play with TSLRCM (The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod) and M4-78EP (M4-78 Enhancement Project) both installed which supposedly restore items that were cut from the game before release and make bits of the story flow together better. So I believe I did in fact get the best possible experience I could have, but even with that the game is somewhat of a mess. Don’t get me wrong I am glad that I finally played through it and there are bits of detail outlined in this game that came up in SWTOR later that I was somewhat oblivious to. The game had some notorious development issues and if you are curious about some of that check out this long form review of the game.

I think more than anything the game suffered from an identity crisis. If you had told me that this was intended to be the further adventures of Revan until six months before release, I would have believed you. You play a character known as the “Jedi Exile” which for all intents and purposes COULD have been Revan, the character you play in the first game. You are a character that has had your connection with the force damaged, and you have officially been exiled by the Jedi Order for your “betrayal” of the Jedi Code. You followed Revan into battle against the Mandalorian forces and instead of following him on further into the Jedi Civil War, you returned to Dantooine to submit to the will of the council. Given that you were the only Jedi to do so… they were not really certain what to do with you and as such Exiled you.

This would have been a reasonable start of a game… playing out this sequence of events. However instead you start the game as T3-M4 from Knights of the Old Republic as you are attempting to keep the Ebon Hawk from falling apart. You are put through a sequence of events as you try and save the ship and land it safely on a mining colony. If you thought this was the tutorial for the game, you would be wrong… because while you can skip it… you then continue onwards to Peragus where you finally get control of the main character for the first time. Again you go through what feels like a sequence of tutorialization as you explore the colony where the robots have run amok and seemingly killed everyone. Upon solving those events you make your way to the nearby Citadel Station hovering over the dead world of Telos.

Immediately after landing on Telos your ship is put into impound and you are placed under house arrest, which now begins the THIRD tutorial section of the game. It is only after solving the events on the Citadel station that you finally regain control of your ship and can explore the galaxy freely. However what feels super odd about this process is that you are one hundred percent on rails for the first three sequences in the game and then suddenly are given free reign in a choose your own adventure style as to which of the planets that you want to tackle first. There is no call to action really, just some information that T3 deus ex machina’s his way into a list of last known locations for the members of the Jedi Council.

I mean in theory you are trying to recruit them to your cause because the Sith are real and they have returned to the galaxy and you are apparently being stalked by a Sith Zombie. However there is zero sense of urgency as you explore these worlds and find lost spanners and shit for the general populace that side note… now hates with much passion the Jedi order. I am not sure what order I should have done the worlds, but I started with Dantooine, thinking that this was the first planet that you visited in KOTOR after escaping Taris. In theory this was probably a good call even though you don’t actually pick up any new companions here. With companions in mind… it might have been a better call to go to Nar Shaddaa first given that you would encounter one of the last core companions earlier.

So getting back to the identity crisis. This game attempts at several points to teach you some lesson or pass some judgement upon you as the player. For example it does this whole sequence where it judges you for all of the combat that you engage in and how it doesn’t exactly align to the Jedi code. Then moments later those attempting to judge you decide that you have to die… forcing you once again into combat and diminishing the impact of what that message might have been. Additionally there is still the problem that the Jedi Exile is not sufficiently different from Revan as to make it seem like you are playing a unique character. Making it even worse is the fact that the character that serves as the narrator for the game… often draws parallels between the two of you.

I think Obsidian had some really interesting ideas, but those ideas did not add up to be a complete game. Instead they sort of applied Band-Aids and glue to join those ideas into something resembling a story. As a result while Knights of the Old Republic is this master class in narrative design and applying the correct amount of pressure at the correct time, the sequel just ends up being this mass of cool ideas assembled into a crude presentation of a game. In my mind I thought this game was released after Fallout New Vegas, but it turns out this is probably what they were working on just before they got the call to make a new Fallout game. Both games are trying to do some interesting and ambitious things, but I can only assume they learned from the mistakes with KOTOR2 in order to stick the landing with New Vegas.

Like I said earlier I do not regret that I played my way through this game. All told it took me around 40 hours to beat it. There are probably some side content that I missed along the way, but I also don’t really feel like much of the side content was meaningful in the way that a game like Witcher 3 makes it. This is a game that had been hanging out on my list that I was always curious about, and now that curiosity is sated. The Jedi Exile is also a character that appeared later in Star Wars the Old Republic and now that I have played this game I understand why so much of a big deal was made about her. Much like they made Revan male in the Canon, they made the Jedi Exile female and named her Meetra Surik. This feels a little odd but I understand it greatly simplifies talking about the characters in the future.

So here we are at the end of the post. Have you played KOTOR2? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below and especially if I missed some great truth about the game.

Mass Effect Thoughts

February 3, 2021 by Belghast

Mass Effect is an extremely important series for me on a personal level. I am not exactly sure when I came to the realization, but it might be the single best piece of Science Fiction that I have experienced. During my formative years I bonded heavily with Star Wars and Dune so I am already wired to love great Science Fiction storytelling. A little over a decade ago I played my very first Mass Effect game with the release of the second game in the series. Mass Effect 1 was originally an exclusive for the Xbox 360 Console, and as such I completely missed out on playing it as I did not have one at the time. It got a PC release in 2007 but I never actually got around to playing it for one reason or another… more than likely it was due to the fact that I was knee deep in the raid scene during Burning Crusade in World of Warcraft.

There are a lot of games that I play repeatedly, but other than Castlevania Symphony of the Night there is no game that I have “finished” as many times as Mass Effect. While I have only actually done the start with the first game and play all the way through to the third game once, I have played some semblance of other sequences on four other times, having played the first game to the second game sequence probably the most. I did not exactly love the wrap of and conclusion brought by the third game, so I am guessing that more or less halted my fairly regularly revisiting this franchise. Though admittedly my in sequence play through was before the revisions brought on by the later Mass Effect 3 patches which I have never gone back and played.

Even though it did not do as well, I have a deep love for Mass Effect Andromeda as well and I was enterally frustrated when the media backlash effectively destroyed this franchise that I love so much. I still want to see a continuation of this storyline, and I want to know more about the Andromeda expedition. I have a whole slew of theories that are more or less going unrequited other than some occasional conversations via DM with Pixel One. I was extremely happy when the teaser came out during the Video Game awards and hinted that maybe we are going to be getting a new story that blends both Mass Effect timelines/settings.

More exciting than anything however is when I found out that finally we had a firm confirmation of the rumored remaster of the series. Then yesterday we found out that this Mass Effect Legendary Edition would be releasing on May 14th 2021, just over three months from now. One of the biggest questions for me personally is whether or not this would do anything to remedy to awkwardness of that first game. I’ve suffered through it a number of times because an in sequence play through largely requires it being there in order for everything to flow together neatly. However in 2007 they had yet to really land on the sort of interface and feel of the game that was going to win it the masses.

Original Game as Pulled from on Website Footage

The biggest problem that the first game has is the mechanical control and UI elements. The controls just feel wrong as compared to my first entry in the series which was technically the second game. The graphics are fine and the dialog and acting is still fairly solid. However actually navigating and experiencing the world feels off. Playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 recently, I am realizing just how far Bioware has come as far as interfaces go. It wasn’t really until 2009’s Dragon Age Origins that they truly “stuck the landing” and then steadily improved on that feeling ever since with Mass Effect 2 landing a year later in 2010. My biggest hope with this remastered version would be to blend everything together so that ALL of the games use the same user interface and same controls for a seamless experience.

Legendary Edition as Pulled from the Website Footage

Ultimately all I really wanted was for them to take the User Interface from Mass Effect 3 and carry it down to the other games. What instead appears to have happened is that all of the games got reworked with a new UI. On the Mass Effect Legendary edition website, they have one of those split screen videos with a slider allowing you to shift back and forth between original and new versions of some Mass Effect 1 footage. In this you can see wildly different interface elements between the above screenshot and the one before it. This gives me hope that the first game got the significant work that was needed.

In all of my plays through the game, the one thing I have never actually managed to do is complete a fun as “FemShep”. Everything that I have heard is that the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard is the better way of playing the game. However my deeply engrained need to keep trying to “create Belghast” in every game I play… has always steered me down the path of playing the Male Shepard. One of my goals on this replay is to dive down the rabbit hole of the Jennifer Hale experience. I can’t say that I will succeed, because supposed the character creator is significantly better than the previous versions allowing you to create wildly different looking Shepards rather than just awkward versions of the stock character.

I am excited to revisit this old friend. I look forward to it much the same way as I might look forward to some day sitting down and re-watching all of the Marvel movies in sequence or revisiting the Lord of the Rings movies at Christmas time. I would love to see Mass Effect adapted as a high budget series, because the story that is told is so good and I am slightly disappointed that more people have not gotten to experience it. If you yourself have never played through this series, then you really should pick up Legendary edition and give it a fair shot.