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This mornings post is going to be a bit of a descent into my madness. One of the things you will have no doubt noticed by now on my blog is that I post a lot of screenshots. It has become a bit of an obsession to have a decent workflow for taking a screenshot from a moment in a game to a properly sized image ready for posting. One of the problems I have encountered over the years is that every single game seems to want to store its screenshots in a different arcane location. While there are websites like the PC Gaming Wiki that can help you decode this nonsense, there are even more games that have no built in screenshot functionality.

My desire is to ultimately have every screenshot that I take land in a single incoming directory, where I can then process and eventually (often times months and months later) sort it into my long network storage. I need to reorganize but I have some rough break downs by game type and then store my images in a directory loosely named off of the game title. The benefit of this is that I can rapidly pull back a screenshot for a game that I have not been playing in ages if I end up needing/wanting to talk about it again. I play an excessive number of games so having some sort of a system helps greatly in trying to decipher this mess.

For years… and I do mean like a decade or so… I used FRAPS. It was the swiss army knife of PC screenshotting tools, and was relatively lightweight in a sort of set it and forget it manner. I configured it to dump into my “gameshots” directory and the rest was history. I could reclaim the fruits of my labor from that location and then convert them as needed for the purpose of the blog. The core problem with this is that FRAPS and Beepa the company behind it… are effectively defunct. Sure you can still purchase licenses for it, but it has not been updated since 2013 and has had a slew of issues starting with Windows 8.1 and continuing with Windows 10.

This lead me down a path that ultimately lead to DXtory at the suggestion of a friend. This application works fairly well… except when it doesn’t and for whatever reason keeps your game from even launching. Anthem for example… will not launch while DXtory is running and I am guessing this has something to do with the way that it is hooking into Direct X as an overlay and it being detected by Anti-Cheat software as somewhat of an aberration. The other issue that I would occasionally run into with DXTory is that it would just stop working out of the blue, and would not start working again until I rebooted. The final nail in the coffin unfortunately is once again DXtory seems to be a bit of an abandonware project given that the last update was in 2017 and the game has numerous unresolved issues.

Another tool that I have used quite a bit is GeForce Experience and its in-game overlay which provides access to taking screenshots and video. This works when it works… and stops working seemingly randomly. There are games that this will capture like a champ, and it has the added benefit of dumping them into a directory named after the information in the games executable. However it was unreliable enough that there were many nights where I thought I was capturing all of this content for the blog… and then get out of the game only to realize I got nothing. Additionally this does not play nicely with Parsec all of the time, which lead to some weirdness that could occasionally cause me to lose mouse input controls while remoted into my upstairs machine.

Greenshot is an open source screenshotting tool that seemed promising. However it has a massive flaw that ultimately drove me away from it. There were many a night when I would be humming along taking screenshots, only to realize later that for whatever reason it was not capturing the game but instead just picture after picture of my desktop. This caused a rapid uninstall and a retreat back into other tools.

Steam has a perfectly cromulent Screenshot functionality, that seems to work flawlessly. It has two fatal flaws as far as I am concerned. The first being that you cannot change where the screenshots are stored and they are stored in a truly arcane path that I die inside a little bit each time I remember that I have memorized it. “Steam\userdata\8795056\760\remote\1085660\screenshots” for example is the directory for Destiny 2, which is a game that is notoriously hard to nab screenshots from with a third party tool. The only bit that is unique to Destiny is the “1085660” which I believe is some kind of Steam Catalog Identifier. I’ve had to rely on this for Destiny for awhile given that neither Fraps nor DXTory were capable of pulling a screenshot. The final flaw however is the fact that this only works for games running under Steam… which is not a case for every game I play.

When I shared this lament with folks online… the almost universal refrain was “What about OBS?”. The thing is… I don’t want to capture video. OBS is my go to for any time I want to capture footage or that I might want to stream, and I use it at work for manipulating my web cam before piping it through video conference software. The problem for me at least is that while OBS does support screenshot functionality, it feels like a lot of overhead to be running this window of OBS that is constantly mirroring my screen just to be recording a still. Then there is the problem with Medal or any of the other “record clips” apps, that they are really focused on live video. Pulling a still from video is messy and often times ends up with anything that was in action being blurred as a result because video doesn’t record full single frames but instead a mishmash that visually works in motion.

Where we have ended up is another piece of software that a friend suggested. ShareX, like Greenshot is also an OpenSource project but it seems to be designed around capturing anything you might want to capture. It has a whole workflow system, which I have only barely scratched and was seemingly designed for the purpose of taking an image and then uploading image to some external host. I am not doing that second part, but I am wondering if I can eventually script it so that it does my entire workflow. Right now I have everything dumping into a single directory, but it seems like I could pretty easily recreate the functionality that GeForce Experience did and name things based on the executable information. So far it “just works” and it has even managed to flawlessly capture Destiny 2, with the caveat being that you have to be running it as Administrator or some games seem to block it.

I’ve been using it for about a week now and everything that I have attempted to capture has been great without any weirdness that I have encountered thusfar. I am hoping that I might have a winner here, and pending that I do I will happily start contributing to the Patreon as a way of funding this thing that is seemingly really hard to find. I have zero qualms supporting the things I used and had licenses to FRAPS, DXTory and even the thing I am going to talk about next… IrfanView. Ultimately I need to dig into the workflow scripting because once I get an image in the incoming directory, that isn’t the end of the process.

I’ve used IrfanView since college for batch image processing, and before that I used something called Graphics Workshop. IrfanView is this awesome one size fits all image viewer software that has plugins to support all sorts of esoteric other formats. The final step before an image ends up on my blog is to run it through a batch conversion where it makes sure the size constrains to at least 1920×1080 (it ignores anything smaller) and then converts it to a JPG to reduce the size. My native resolution is 3840×2160 aka “4k” and I have no interest in posting something that large on my blog. However I do like storing the original image capture for any future needs down the line. As a result I everything gets run through IrfanView which also moves the screenshot to its final resting place signifying that it is ready to post on the blog.

I am hoping that ShareX stays with me for awhile. So far I have yet to encounter a game that it would not capture. I need to spend some time learning about its functionality because I am using it for only a fraction of what it seems to be able to do. If it could replace my entire workflow it would be phenomenal, so that it could save a copy in Full Resolution and then send a scaled down copy to my working directory as well. I know this is probably madness but I feel like it is useful every so often to peel back the curtain and talk about how I approach things.

It has been a few days and the dust is starting to settle, but on 21st the game world was shocked by the announcement that Microsoft was going to acquire Zenimax the parent company of Bethesda Game Studios. What this practically means is that Microsoft will be the publisher of the Elder Scrolls series, Fallout series, Doom series, Quake series, Wolfenstein series and Dishonored series among others. Bethesda itself has gobbled up a number of studios in a bid to compete with other major second party studios like EA and Ubisoft. It is somewhat uncertain however how this is going to change the calculus of how business is done in Maryland.

The initial concern is of course that this is going to lock Bethesda titles to being exclusive to the Xbox, XCloud and Windows PC platforms. At least in the short term there are a number of games that have already signed contacts for PlayStation timed exclusivity and it seems like those are going through as planned. Immediately this is going to mean is that the Bethesda games will be making their way to XCloud and Game Pass which makes me wonder how exactly something like and Elder Scrolls Online will work in this world. The truth is I am optimistic about this decision because I can’t necessarily say that it has been bad for other studios that have become acquired.

I’m a big fan of the State of Decay series and Undead Labs and for the most part what acquisition has brought is a seeming stability. There are a lot of names that I see associated with that company still all these years later that I talked to in person at Pax South. They’ve become a company with a single franchise unfortunately, but they have done a good job of supporting State of Decay and its sequel without having to load it up with heinous microtransactions and are prepped to bring the third installment to the Xbox Series Whatever. Admittedly they started off as a company on Xbox Live Arcade on the 360 and for the most part have always supported Xbox and Windows PC so it wasn’t likely much of a transition to move to being a first party studio.

Another studio that got gobbled up is Double Fine a studio with a notoriously independent streak. Tim Shafer has talked candidly about this quite a bit and for them it was largely a move for stability once again. Wildly paraphrasing, he has talked about in the past how tight the independent development cycle is and how rough the finances have been and Microsoft represented a huge font of available cash. You can’t acquire a studio like Double Fine without a full realization of just how quirky they are and how unique the products that they make are, so I would like to think that Microsoft is more or less just going to allow them to continue doing their thing.

Microsoft has been on this acquisition spree, gobbling up game studios and then seemingly letting them do their thing. A prime example is the acquisition of Mojang studios and with it Minecraft which brought a massive rewrite of the game that it desperately needed. However this new version doesn’t support the modding capabilities that the original Java client did, but they have seemingly continued supporting the old kludgy mess along with the new hotness. As far as I can tell the only thing they have done is bring a sort of regularity to the update cycle and the churning out of new features. The clients for “rival” consoles have languished a bit but they are trying to join them all together under a shared Bedrock edition. Basically it has not meant the end of Minecraft and I don’t think this acquisition will really change much for the day to day business of making the next generation of Bethesda titles.

This acquisition made sense for Microsoft for a lot of reasons. I have talked about this generation being a battle of business models. Microsoft is going hard on the game pass model and the recent deal with EA Play bringing it to the platform only underlines this point. Game Pass is massive for the players and I went on a whole twitter thread about this the other day. I use the hell out of it to try new things out, and it still floors me that games are available on day one to download and even pre-load ahead of time. Star Wars Squadrons is a huge game that is coming out soon, and I am probably going to wait to play it through the Game Pass because me and flight sim type games don’t often get along. It gives me the opportunity to test something out before I commit to it, which I find myself doing a lot more.

This generation really seems to be defined by Microsoft who are leaning hard into platform as a service with a reoccurring monthly/yearly subscription that unlocks access to a significantly library of games. Sony on the other hand is for the most part pushing a single platform with their own exclusives and the key decision being made is if you go digital or disc with those purchases. Xbox as a platform seems not to care what system you are playing the games on and appears to be supporting console, pc and mobile via xcloud equally well. It is really that last offering that I would love to see them flesh out some more with the addition of clients for other platforms like PC, Mac, and maybe even some consoles like the Nintendo Switch. If I could play my Xbox library on the Switch I would be so freaking into that.

What I wonder however is if all of the Intellectual property that is being gained in the form of Bethesda games is just icing on the cake. Last year at E3 Bethesda introduced that they were working on a new technology called Orion that had the ambiguous goal of making games run better on streaming platforms. The tests that were shown were all involving XCloud and Doom 2016, but the results were supposedly phenomenal. It makes me wonder if this acquisition was at least in part a way to lock down this tech and make it exclusive to Xcloud and serve as a market differentiator between the streaming options. Microsoft is putting a lot of eggs in this basket and it would make sense that they want XCloud to have every advantage possible.

I’ve talked a lot about the potential positives here, but here comes the big negative. I don’t forsee a world where we do not see new Bethesda/Zenimax games coming out exclusively on the Xbox platform which includes Windows PC and mobile via Xcloud. I am not sure if this is going to be a timed exclusive or a true exclusive, but whatever the case something like that is going to happen and you aren’t likely to play Starfield or Elder Scrolls 6 on team blue. Sony has its own stable of first party exclusives and that is the reason why I will probably always own a Sony PlayStation. Does this Bethesda exclusivity negatively impact me? Not really because I will always favor the PC when given an option of how to play my games and Microsoft has shown that they are willing to treat console and PC as equals.

Does this suck a lot for players who are console only and own a PlayStation? Yes, yes it does. Do I think platform exclusivity is a good thing? Not really and I honestly find it pretty freaking annoying. However it has been the rule of the land since the Nintendo Entertainment System era, and I don’t really see that changing any time soon. Do I think Microsoft is finished acquiring companies? Probably not and I think both Sega and Capcom look like potential targets. Capcom is going to be a little awkward to acquire, but the controlling interest is only 22% which seems highly vulnerable to me. For the players however I think the things that Microsoft is offering at the price points they are offering it is deeply compelling. Game Pass is a phenomenal deal for the consumers, but I guess time will tell how good of a deal for the studios it ultimately is.

The last few days have seen folks losing their shit over pre-order frustrations, myself included. On the 16th the PlayStation 5 started pre-orders in a very haphazard manner leading to a lot of units seemingly snapped up by flippers and not that many folks in my circle managing to secure the unit they were wanting. Yesterday Microsoft tried something different and instead started all of the preorders at the same time, or at least attempted to. It felt like Microsoft was even throwing a little bit of shade on what happened with Sony, which now seems like hubris. Yesterday did not go smoothly but I can’t necessarily tell if it was more or less successful than the Sony start.

Modern Vintage Gamer is an excellent YouTube channel that goes over the security and design of retro consoles, and he was an early member of the Xbox mod scene. He filmed his out journey yesterday as he attempted to get a system as the preorders started. In my experience it seems like the only folks who got a unit early were the ones who tried to do so through Walmart.com. Target and the Microsoft store both cratered under the weight of all of the user sessions. I have no idea what happened with Best Buy because either the preorders went so fast that it seemed like they never had any, or they still have yet to do their presells.

The person that I knew that was most invested in getting a Xbox Series X was my friend Pete, so I more or less lived vicariously through him during this launch. In the lead up to the PlayStation 5 pre-orders I had followed a bunch of sources of gaming news and releases and as the process unfolded I was sending Pete links each time a new one came across my feed. Even though I expanded my feed significantly, the two best ones seem to be the tried and true that I have followed for years @Wario64 and @VideoGameDeals. Luckily when things opened up on Amazon he managed to get in and snag a unit and hopefully it really is a good order.

That has been another frustration in this whole process is not really being certain that you did in fact lock in your preorder. During the PS5 preorder, there have been cases of orders being invalidated because the platform oversold the number of units that they had been allocated. The image above is from my own PS5 preorder through Sam’s Club and I am hoping it is real. That last statement however always gives me great concern, because they can and have changed orders on me in the past but never in a significant manner. To be truthful… the only online retails that seem to have been able to handle this in stride are Walmart/Sams and Amazon. Target, Best Buy and Game Stop sites all fell apart under the load of all of the people trying to hit them in both the Xbox and PS5 situations. In all of those cases I had systems in basket but encountered problems actually checking out.

So the question that has been kicking around my circles is why this console preorder cycle seems to matter so much. For me I had put off upgrading to a PS4 Pro for roughly a year and a half thinking that the PS5 had to be right around the corner. So this was absolutely a purchase that I had planned for a long time and as such I have a back log of games that I would simply rather play in glorious 4k. For others… I think given the shitty times that we find ourselves living in we are in essence trying to buy happiness or at least future happiness. I’ve been watching a lot of collectable markets that are tied to the nostalgia of days gone by booming. Vintage Magic the Gathering prices for example are going through the roof after stalling or retracting at the beginning of the pandemic.

All products right now are having severe supply chain issues, either in getting the materials needed to manufacture something or getting the product out to the customers. This is leading to an artificial sense of scarcity on products that should in theory be stable. We all remember the toilet paper rush at the beginning of the pandemic, and I still have yet to be able to purchase a single Clorox wipe either online or in store. This ends up building to a anxiety of not being able to get the things we want or need and that is sort of trickling out to everything as well. Console launches are always stressful and frantic, but the level of fervor over this one is considerably higher. Products that feed into this, like Zendikar Rising Set Boosters which already have a massive gambling component are benefiting by either a real or manufactured scarcity. In this example it is a product that should retail for $150 a box that is going upwards of $250 if you can even find it.

So we live in this time when things that should never normally be hard to get are weirdly hard to get. I think everyone is craving stability and normalcy, and it is leading us all to do some somewhat dumb things. For me it is raging over trying to order a console system that doesn’t really even really have a game that requires it. For others it is attending big house parties that end up infecting everyone with Covid-19 all because they craved social contact. We are living in weird times and I find myself digging deep into nostalgia to get through them. I think that is why I have been hoarding cartoons that I grew up watching and playing World of Warcraft again because it lets me drift along on the afterglow of better times. Folks deal with things differently, and I am trying to do so in the manner that keeps me the safest in the long run.