Uncategorized

Exploring Undecember

by

Hey Folks! This weekend I spent some time exploring the ARPG called Undecember. I was completely unaware of this game until the launch of Diablo Immortal, and shortly after that point, the folks behind this title started doing some sponsored videos. However similar to Diablo Immortal, discussion of the game also came with a discussion of its cash shop and pay-to-win elements. After going through what we went through with Diablo Immortal and being so egregiously monetized… I decided that I would just give this game a hard pass.

I had largely put it entirely out of my mind when this weekend on a whim I decided to go through steam recommendations. One of the things I greatly appreciate about the Steam interface is the recommendations by friends section because in truth… I care way more about the opinion of my friends than I do any gaming pundit. So I noticed that Teufelaffe had left a review and honestly… it was enough to spark my curiosity and get me to install the game. His stance largely aligns with mine… that I don’t care if there is a way to shortcut the process by spending money so long as it isn’t required to do so. That was the problem I had with Diablo Immortal is that you could not get a fully geared-out character without spending literally tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This created a hard wall that blocked my progression where I could not function in Hell 2 because I lacked the “gear score” to make it viable because the game was actively debuffing me for not having spent enough money.

As Teufelaffe said in his review, the game really does feel like a blending of the best parts of Diablo III and some of the better parts of Path of Exile. It is a game where you have no classes and that you get to create your own character and choose their appearance. Then the spell gems that you equip and attribute points that you spend, determine what sorts of builds you can do. I opted to go for a largely Dexterity-based character, trying to replicate something like the Diablo III demon hunter so I am wearing leather armor, spending most of my points in Dex, and using ranged bow abilities. The hardest thing to get used to is the fact that you do not have full control over all of your keybinds… left click is your movement key and there seems to be no way to change that. However, if you hold down your left click you can steer with your mouse cursor which is functionally what I do with putting “force move” on W in the games that will support it. It took some getting used to but now feels comfortable enough.

Instead of relying on getting gear with specific sockets on it, in order to make your build like Path of Exile you have a hex grid that you lay gems on. Each gem has six sides and each side can have one of three colors on it or be completely empty without any colors. Essentially you can use these special helper gems to link other abilities or buff specific things about it. For example, my main attack right now is a spread shot and I have it linked to cast the ability Chain Lightning on hit. That means I fire off this spread of arrows and the first time it makes contact with any enemy, that triggers a lightning bolt to course and spread through surrounding enemies. Spread Shot also has a green gem that increases the number of projectiles… and I am sharing that with another ability called Flame Shot. Essentially it becomes this puzzle game of trying to figure out how best to place your gems in order to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit.

One thing of note is that Undecember is also a mobile game, and is available on Android and iOS and with it… comes a number of very mobile mechanics. Every time you do anything in the game, you are going to see a dozen teal arrows light up on your interface drawing your attention to various systems. This means spending a lot of time clicking through various menus in order to get various “rewards” that are largely meaningless at the moment because I am not entirely certain what anything does yet. The same is true with the cash shop in general. There are things that the game would like me to buy there, but all of it largely seems like nonsense. The only thing that I did notice is that it would cost you about $40 to buy a full cosmetic skin because skins are broken up into 4 chunks: armor, helm, mainhand, offhand… and each of those costs around $10 in cash shop currency.

For those who have played Path of Exile, the crafting system will be very familiar. In fact, there are a number of items that you will simply recognize as their Path of Exile equivalents… like I got my first Chaos Orb and Exalted Orb the other day and the icons feel similar enough. You can do some basic crafting through the enchant system at the blacksmith, or more hardcore crafting recipes at the alchemy table… aka the crafting bench. One thing that takes a bit to get used to is the fact that you have to manually level your gems by feeding them magic shards. That means at some point in the future you will be grinding random stuff trying to get magic shard drops so that you can catch your gems up. Right now I have not really struggled but at 30… I am starting to notice that I simply don’t have enough magical dust to level everything up at the same time.

All told I have been enjoying myself quite a bit and if you also were looking for a happy midpoint between Diablo III and Path of Exile you might check it out. I will let you know as I progress through the game if I hit any hard paywalls. That will be the point at which I check out, because while I am not afraid of spending money on a game… I don’t want it to be a requirement to progress. We tried some of the groupings over the weekend and unfortunately, there is no level-scaling, so you can drag someone along like you can in Diablo III but if you want grouping to be meaningful… you will have to stay within the level range of your friends. I am hoping that when I reach the endgame the content will be fun for grouping because right now the normal leveling content isn’t terribly exciting with other players.

So now to finish up with a bit of housekeeping. Last Friday I posted a note as a bit of a teaser stating that I was involved in the rollout of a gaming-focused Mastodon Instance. It rolled out on Sunday but I regret to inform you that I am no longer involved with it, nor can I suggest that anyone migrate to it. My yesterday was honestly pretty awful and it involved a sequence of events that led to me getting ejected from the planning discord, moderator status, and ultimately losing my account on the server. Granted I am being told that my account and the account of Scopique were not deleted… but they disappeared in sequence with me being shut out of the project so I drew what felt like obvious conclusions because neither account exists anymore. It was a bad situation but I am not going to go into details publicly, suffice it to say I am withdrawing my support in any capacity from the project. If you do migrate be cautious I guess that is all I would say.

I hope you all have a great day and a phenomenal week… and I am hoping my mental health improves because yesterday was a massive blow to it.

Everfall Alligator Habitat Farm

by

Good Morning Friends! I hope today is getting started in a reasonable manner. We continue on with the series of New World gear farms that I have spent the last few weeks documenting. This one is a bit of an odd one because technically you will be located within the boundaries of Everfall, but more naturally you are actually on the edge of Ebonscale Reach. On this farm, you will be hanging out near a waterfall and taking down a giant white crocodile over and over. I specifically came out here seeking a good necklace and a strength-based Great Axe, but having a Tanner Shirt drop is also a nice added bonus.

The core problem with this farm is where it is located. You have a few options namely that you can either run through Ebonscale Reach and an area infested with very aggro Alligators, or you can drop down a waterfall coming from the Everfall side. My suggestion and the directions that I have drawn in are to drop down from the Everfall side. You will of course need to understand how to break up your fall into smaller segments to keep from dying in the process as you cannot survive just jumping in from above given that there are no actual swimming mechanics. You will need to slide down the mountain and hit ledges on the way down to break up the momentum of your fall. Once there you can safely hang out next to the waterfall where the Tazorjaw won’t actually aggro you when it spawns in.

The worst part about this camp is that the terrain around the waterfall is a little janky, and it is entirely possible for a loot bag to spawn in half embedded in the ground. If this happens hold still and look for sparkles on the ground, which will indicate where the bag is located. Then in theory you should be able to hover over that patch of ground and loot what just dropped. I tried to kill him backed into the corner of the waterfall as the terrain there seemed to lead to more reasonable drop locations. All in all, this was a pretty quick farm and I got all of the drops in less than two hours. You will of course also get a lot of leather from the gator each time you skin it. Let’s look at the drops.

The big bonus of this camp is the Tanner Shirt, which sells pretty well on the trading post if you get spares. I know in my short farm I think I picked up three of them in total. The most common drop for me was the necklace, and the hardest thing to get dropped was the Greatsword. However, as I have talked about before since the game tends to “get stuck” on a single item your mileage may vary significantly. I have a handful more of these guides that I will be posting over the coming days and have collected them into a Loot Farms category on my blog. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below.

Cenobites and Werewolves

by

Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a most excellent weekend. This weekend was more dedicated to watching films than to playing much in the way of games. I kept up my daily Tower of Fantasy and New World activity and spent quite a bit more time in Night City but the key activities centered around three movies that I had been looking forward to watching. As a result, most of this post is going to be me trying to give my best spoiler-free impressions of each.

Hellraiser (2022) – Hulu

I have to admit that going into this movie I was deeply confused as to what it actually was. I thought it was a series and I thought it was intended to be a reboot of the franchise. In truth, it is neither of these things. Instead of a series, we are treated to a full-length movie, and honestly one of the better ones so far in the Hellraiser franchise. Essentially for me, the first three films in the original series are pretty good, with the third one being more a matter of taste than the first two. While I enjoyed Hellraiser Bloodlines because it felt like it book ended the story, it is also a deeply subjective thing and most people think it was the beginning of the end. Everything that came after was released directly to home video and can largely be skipped unless you are a glutton for punishment… but it might be more enjoyable to ACTUALLY summon the Cenobites than to watch those films.

This Hulu Hellraiser does a great job of walking a very narrow path between being completely new and unique… while still largely being complimentary to everything that came before it. Nothing in the movie outright contradicts the things that we already knew, and more than anything just fleshes out and expands the universe. The new designs for Pinhead and the other Cenobites are exquisite, and I am extremely obsessed with the one that is apparently being referred to as the Weeper. Jamie Clayton does an excellent job of playing Pinhead and they seem way more like “Dark Angels” than the original designs. If you were a big fan of the original, and especially the extended lore that surrounded them… then I think you will probably enjoy yourself as well.

Werewolf by Night (2022) – Disney Plus

I’ve been looking forward to this movie for so long and more than anything… the Werewolf by Night character joining the MCU. I think we are likely setting ourselves up for maybe a Dark Avengers at some point in the future. I loved these comics as a kid because like I talked about on Friday… the movie Lost Boys and my desire to find the comics in that film… led me down a rabbit hole of diving into all of the Marvel horror comics. The film itself is this delightful noir affair that harkens back to the “Universal Monsters” series of black-and-white films. It also has some pretty great comedic moments and introduces another of my favorite characters the monster that is being hunted.

I am really hesitant to go into much more detail because I don’t want to spoil anything, but I have a feeling that everyone is going to love Ted.

Day Shift (2022) – Netflix

To be completely honest, after the first two… Day Shift is a bit of a drop in quality. That is not to say it is not an extremely enjoyable movie, but it just hits differently. The Day Shift is essentially a buddy cop meets modern vampire hunter story. The positive is you get to see Snoop and Jamie Foxx as vampire hunters. The negative is the vampires themselves are not terribly interesting. There are elements of the film that feel like they have been borrowed from simply better stories. Again I am not bashing the film because I enjoyed it quite a bit, just trying to temper your expectations. The big takeaway from this film is that I really want to see Snoop in a Western as a gunslinger-type character. Jamie Foxx is a talented enough actor that he can make even the most milquetoast story entertaining to watch. Had this movie come out in the 90s, we would have loved it because it feels like a product of that cinematic generation.

Other than that I am winding my way down toward the end of this Cyberpunk playthrough. I am stalling out the main story so I can spend more time in each of the neighborhoods knocking out side quests. there is a ton of content that I never saw in my first playthrough, in part because I was hooked on the main narrative path and wanted to see it through to the conclusion. Now that I know the story and several of the alternate endings… I can take my time and spend more time just engaging with the streets and what they have to offer. There are quests that I have not found yet that I remember fondly, but cannot remember what triggered them. Essentially questing away in Night City has been a delightful diversion while waiting on the New World patch drop coming up on the 18th.

Drop Your Shorts

by

Good Morning Friends! This morning’s post is going to document a bit of a personal crusade I have been on for the last few years. In September of 2020, YouTube debuted the Shorts medium, which is a portrait mode video format that can have a maximum duration of sixty seconds. It seems that the idea was with Tik Tok eating their lunch with younger demographics… they would attempt to rebrand themselves into something that was more phone friendly. This was fine and I mostly was able to ignore it, until Google started pushing hard for existing content creators to start using the format. Overnight it seemed like many sites that I had previously followed were releasing more short content than they were long-form video, and as such, I started looking for ways to block it.

The YouTube home page has the ability to hide the shorts content for 30 days at a time, and I was mostly okay with this. However, there was seemingly no way to actually block it in my subscription feed. I am not sure how most people consume YouTube, but I tend to treat it like it was an RSS feed and much like consuming a blog roll, my default mode was to flip over to my subscriptions tab to see what was new from the various creators that I might be interested in. It has annoyed me to no end that in the middle of my 16:9 feed would appear these oddball vertical videos, breaking up the visual harmony of the screen. This isn’t that bad, but there have been days where the majority of a screen would be consumed by shorts that I could do nothing to remove.

I searched for some sort of addon to remove them for me. The closest thing I was able to find was this Mozilla Plugin that reported blocking shorts. I had a few problems, firstly I was not sure if I wanted to give a random plugin full access to my YouTube data. Additionally, as I have highlighted in green above, the plugin requires that you turn on autoplay in order for it to work. I really do not like YouTube autoplaying because I have the bad habit of just letting it run on in the background for hours. My core method of consuming youtube is as a podcast, with it either playing in the background or on another screen while I am doing something else. So while I don’t doubt the author of this plugin has pure intentions, it is also the only one they have ever published it is hard to view a track record. Basically, I decided against using it and continued my search.

Yesterday I hit a particular spot where I was frustrated by the fact that YouTube was not accepting my “hide for 30 days” on shorts from the home page. This prompted me to do some more searching and I must have varied my terms because I actually found something interesting. I found a filter list created for an addon that I have used for ages called uBlock Origin. Over on the website LetsBlock.it a user had uploaded a set of filters designed to remove shorts entirely from YouTube. Essentially you open settings for uBlock Origin and paste the script from the webpage linked into your “My Filters” tab. Upon closing out of the settings and refreshing YouTube, the changes will apply, and if working as intended… you should no longer see shorts of any kind. It seems to have some side effects of also hiding Shorts content from google searching as well. I am perfectly fine with that, but you might at least be aware of that.

Now I can consume my subscription feed without seeing those little YouTube Shorts speedbumps in the middle of it. I get that this is probably an entirely “me” thing, but just in case there were others out there eternally annoyed by this format, I would share how I removed them. I think mostly for me it is a side effect that I do not consume video content on my phone. This is combined with the fact that even when I do watch the occasional video clip on my phone… I do so without headphones and keep my phone on silent mode permanently. I really do not like my devices making noise, and since I am not a part of the orchard I never got used to wearing wireless earbuds all the time. That means my primary source of YouTube is while sitting at a 16:9 screen with headphones on, often while playing a game and it runs in the background.

Now with one dragon slain… I move my attention to Instagram. Unfortunately, this seems to be a tougher nut to crack, but I would love to find an easy way to block stories, reels, suggested content… and of course ads. Instagram is a platform for idly flipping through pictures that my friends have posted, and I use it exclusively for that. However, I seem to spend most of my time being served content that is not from any of the people I am following. Stories are easy enough to ignore, but I am never going to actually consume them regularly. Reels have the same problem as Shorts of being an attempt to turn Instagram into Tik Tok. However based on the limited research I have done, there isn’t an easy way to intercept this and filter things out as the Instagram UI is serving up ALL of the content from the same servers and largely treating it all the same. Oh well… I have to have a mission to keep me going and this will be one that I can chew on for awhile.