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A Lament for Uncomplicated Feelings

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Good Morning Folks. Often times what you end up seeing here on my blog has at least started in some small part with some random comments here or there or on social media. Not that I expect anyone out there to be hanging on my ramblings, but if you follow me on Gamepad.club especially you might have seen the beginnings of this post. We are nearing the end of the year and there is something about that that ends up making me a bit introspective. This combined with a harmless comment that I read about something I wrote… has made me sort of evaluate what I am producing in the world. Truth be told… there are a lot of times I come across as an angry old man yelling at the clouds.

This is not the person I want to be, but I also feel like I am trapped in a pattern. My world is actually relatively small in truth. I have my wife, my cats, and my home… and then the handful of you out in the world who care enough about me to interact on a regular basis. This is not necessarily pity trip territory, because truth be told… it is the world I have wanted. Social interaction often drains me to the point of brittleness and working remotely for the last four years has been more good than bad. However, this small world also means that I have a bad habit of clinging to things a bit too harshly and placing my hopes and fears in external sources. I should in fact probably “touch grass” more often even though I have always thought that phrase was a bit too dismissive.

Anyways… I really miss the joyful exuberance I used to feel about gaming. I miss being able to feel wholly uncomplicated feelings about a brand-new game. Now everything is tinged with regret and bitterness and I am not sure I know a way to push past that. Either I end up comparing it to games that came before, or I deep dive too critically into the flaws and never end up talking about the positives. Then there is the problem with the social ramifications of gaming, for example, I probably would have enjoyed the Harry Potter open-world game, but refuse to give any more money to that franchise because it ultimately ends up supporting a vicious hatemonger. Nothing is simple anymore, and it feels like it can never be simple… at least not in the way that it used to be.

Maybe this is just a casualty of aging, and viewing the world through more jaded eyes. Maybe I am just suffering from depression that continues to grow while I refuse to do anything substantive about it. Maybe the games really have changed and I am no longer the target audience, or at least not in the same way that I used to be. Nostalgia is a terrible drug, because it makes us wallow in better times… that are themselves false afterimages of what the experience truly felt like in the moment. I can’t play Mass Effect for example without remembering how amazed I was the first time I played through it. That old game is nowhere near as rich as my brain makes it out to be, because I cannot separate the decades of fan service and good feelings towards Bioware from the game that is actually there.

What worries me is that I sometimes feel a sense of betrayal when it comes to a game. For example, I was legitimately angry at the way the story turned out in Diablo IV. Does the game deserve my ire? Probably not. It just wasn’t a good story, much in the way that there are a lot of completely mid movies out there that I seem to be able to consume just fine without getting angry at them. However Diablo as a franchise is a core part of my gaming soul. It was extremely important to me over the years and was a rock that I could lean on when I needed it, as a result, I get frustrated when it goes in directions that I think are poorly planned. I have almost thirty years’ worth of emotional weight being balanced on this franchise… and there is no way in hell it could ever live up to my expectations. Not to mention there is a fair amount of general bitterness that I feel towards Blizzard that is coloring my opinions.

I want to be a Boisterous Buffon Bouncing through life, finding magic in every moment. I want that so badly. I am legitimately jealous of folks who seem to be able to pull that off. I am sure that a lot of it is forced and often toxic positivity, but it still looks really damned appealing when I am wallowing in the depths of malaise at times. I do not want to be the downer that ruins an experience for someone else, because that is just meanspirited even if unintentional. There are a lot of times I hold my tongue and don’t speak… which only serves to cause the bile to well up whenever I do say something. Maybe I don’t come across as negative as I feel like I do, but I certainly feel like I am putting way more of that into the world than I want to. Gaming is supposed to bring us joy after all… not misery.

Why are all of these feelings rising to the surface right now? I was thoroughly disappointed in Diablo IV, which is a game that I waited for over a decade to arrive. At the end of this month, Dragon Age Veilguard releases, and I am deeply concerned that the game will not live up to my hopes. Dragon Age is another one of those really important franchises for me, and everything I see about this… gives me “seeking a different audience” vibes. I am going to play it because of course I have to play it. I did not necessarily love the direction that Inquisition went, but I still eventually came around to really enjoying the experience of playing it. A Games Journalist compared the game to the most recent God of War outing, which weirdly fills me with dread especially given that I actually genuinely enjoyed playing at least the first of the recent games. Similarly, I actually ended up really liking the Final Fantasy Seven Remake in spite of it completely changing the way that the mechanics worked.

Regardless of my attempts at rationalizing my fears away, the other part of my being is telling me that this is not the Bioware that I once loved. Truth be told NONE of these companies… are the company that they used to be. Bioware is a label that was bought and placed on top of an Electronic Arts studio, much in the same way that CompUSA and CircuitCity were once bought to create fake storefronts that all fed content from Tiger Direct. The era of “Studio Magic” is over for many of the names that we once clung to. There are smaller studios that are now taking the mantle of always churning out magic, but my brain still has a really hard time disconnecting decades worth of nostalgia from the reality that in many ways rampant capitalism has ruined these studios that I used to love. I can still feel good about supporting Larian, Supergiant Games, or Eleventh Hour Games… but it is hard to rewire the mental circuitry.

I am also super concerned that on the 15th of November Path of Exile II is going to drop and I won’t really like that either. I’ve spent more than enough on cosmetic items in the first game to likely automatically qualify for early access to the second game. It just feels like everything is “soullike” at the moment, and I am really ready for that design pattern to die in a fucking fire. That has been another growing frustration that makes me feel like I am no longer the target audience for many games. I am just not really interested in “challenge for challenge’s sake” experiences. That is not why I play video games or have ever played video games. I don’t play to prove out good I am at something… I play to escape reality for a while and to feel powerful when so often I feel completely powerless in my own reality.

Legitimately I have no clue why I sat down to write this today, other than occasionally I need to get something out of my head and the easiest way to do so is to commit it to the page. Folks usually end up attaching to one specific piece of what I said when I do one of these giant emotional vomit posts. I am fine… I will be fine as I always have been. I just miss being cheerful and joyous without any bitter fetters attached to it. I guess they call it baggage for a reason… because you carry it with you and can never seem to ever truly leave it behind.

Finishing Season Six

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Yesterday I realized that I was a heck of a lot closer to finishing up the Seasonal Journey in Diablo IV Season Six than I thought I was. Essentially all that was required was leveling my fifth glyph up to 15, which I had not even started leveling because I am only on paragon board four. What I was not expecting was just how many boss-summoning materials that I would end up getting. It now totally makes sense that Ace had so many more summons than me the other night because they are absolutely the sort of tryhard person who cares about the seasonal track. They had finished it up a few days ago I think, and I was not even vaguely paying attention to the items there. In fact this is the very first time I have finished the seasonal track in Diablo IV. I used to push to do it in Diablo III because there were cosmetics on the line, but the sheer practice of ticking off boxes… that has never driven me terribly hard.

What DOES drive me however is the cosmetic rewards track. I still have around twenty more levels to go before finishing that out and I think whenever I accomplish this I will probably bid adieu to Diablo IV. This time around especially there is some really cool armor associated with this rewards track and I had the currency for it when the season launched so I figured “what the heck”. I really like this spear, which oddly enough reminds me quite a bit of the spear that I regularly use in Guild Wars 2. Sadly I never made it super far in last season’s battlepass, but there were some cosmetics there that I would have liked to have gotten. What is cool about this rewards track more than any season previously, is that the free track is actually good. It is this whole really detailed pirate outfit, which is a significant change from the boring “casual clothes” look that previous free cosmetics have been in this game.

I am also nowhere near finishing the Zakarum Remnants faction, because I hate the consumable league mechanic. In theory, I need to grind out a lot of Hordes trying to get an Ancestral version of my boots, and that is probably a decent mode of play to burn some opals on. I gotta admit that I am days away from just macroing all of my attacks to a single button. It feels like the optimal mode of play for my build is just to mash all of my keys as fast as possible to make sure I never miss a single ability cast. Folks will clown on the one-button builds in Path of Exile, but there has to be a happy medium between that and “toddler pretending to type” gameplay that we currently have in Diablo IV. The reality is everything about my build is designed to lower the cooldown of abilities so that I can hit them faster… and hitting them faster means more damage output.

My current build is sort of a bad ideas build, where I am using this unique item called Jacinth Shell that is trying to kill me. Essentially it deals 10% of my maximum life per second when I have abilities on cooldown… which lowers the cooldowns of those abilities… so I can hit them faster. It also heals me every time I spend vigor. The problem with my current chest is that I really need a maximum roll of 10% on the healing bit… and I really wish this game had Divine Orbs. Essentially this would feel much better if I was healing and damage at the same rate… but I am not. So I mostly just survive due to the fact that I am also building up like 3000 barriers at any given time and 8000 fortify. Unfortunately, there are times when I just take random death similar to how those feel in Path of Exile, and it is sort of miserable.

I have been contemplating just shifting over to the IWIN build that Ace has been running often referred to as Orange Quill. I would absolutely do this thing in a heartbeat if Diablo IV had the Armory system from Diablo III. The thought of going through the hassle of setting back up my Paragon Boards is probably the main thing keeping me from doing it. I have one of the scrolls that resets everything for free, so I could do it… but lord is it a pain in the ass to build a character in this game. That is coming from me… who thinks nothing of the complete nonsense of the Path of Exile passive and atlas trees. It just feels so much more tedious because you are spending so many more points, most of which don’t really feel meaningful until you have amassed the entire structure. I need to look at the build and see if I actually have all of the uniques ready to go because I think I have ratholed a copy of pretty much everything that build needs.

I feel like I have hit a bit of a cap. I barely made it through The Pit 55, and it is wild because I can pretty reliably do Torment 3 content aka Pit 50. I just can’t quite kill things fast enough to keep from falling behind, and the bosses themselves take forever. I have technically done a 55, but it isn’t something that I can guarantee every single run, and relies on a lot of luck regarding what types of mobs spawn. So I am not sure what I need to do to push my build a bit higher. I spent a good chunk of last night trying to level my Glyphs thinking that might help, but I just don’t seem to have the raw damage output or killing speed that Ace has had when we have grouped up. So I am in an awkward spot with my build where I need to essentially decide how committed I am to that Centipede life.

Anyways. I do sort of feel like my engagement with Diablo IV is winding down. I had a lot of fun getting to this point, save for the main story quest… but I am also not sure how much I want to keep pushing for the sake of pushing.

Diminishing Returns

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Good Morning Folks! Two days ago Sony unveiled its technical presentation for the upcoming release of the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro, and it has not been well received by the gaming populace and media. Largely the key sticking point seems to be the price point of $700 for the digital-only version, which becomes around $850 by the time you add in the optional disc drive attachment and vertical stand. That is starting to get into gaming computer territory when it comes to pricing and seems to be out of band with the current pricing for all other consoles on the market. You can pick up a PS5 Slim, which is capable of playing all of the same games currently for $440, making this product almost double the price given that the slim model I just priced comes with the disc drive.

The key complaint that I have seen about the digital-only focus, is that it essentially locks players into always paying the highest possible price for a given game. Sony is notoriously stingy when it comes to sales. Just a quick example Spider-Man 2 at this point is a year old roughly and you can pick it up pretty reliably for $50 new in disc form if not cheaper whereas on the Sony store, this is still a $70 title. Console players already pay a roughly $10 premium over PC Gamers for their titles, so I get why folks would want to buy the disc version of games so they can get a bit of a price break. There is also the fear of digital titles disappearing, for example, the ill-fated Concord recently was removed from players’ inventories, and I remember something similar happening with the Scott Pilgrim game during the PS3 era that if you did not have it downloaded it just poofed from your library without a refund.

All of that said… I think something else is at work here. Right now the most popular console of this generation is the Nintendo Switch with some 143 Million units sold. This is compared to the PS5 which currently just crossed 60 million units. The Nintendo Switch has arguably the worst hardware and output quality of ANY console on the market currently. However, its focus on having really fun gameplay and bringing interesting experiences to the players has made it a bit of a media darling. Almost everyone owns a Switch regardless of where they land on the Xbox vs PS5 vs PC tribal debate. The games that it plays well, it plays really well and as a result, it becomes this amazing Swiss army knife of a device that you can take with you or dock to get maximum usability. Basically, my theory is that players care way more about the gameplay than they do about graphical fidelity.

We’ve been in this cycle for decades of hardware manufacturers telling us that we want the new hotness just on the horizon. 4k was the big thing, now it is high refresh and 8k resolutions, but the truth is… I don’t think most gamers really care about these things that much. I bought into 4k gaming pretty early on with a 1080 Ti and later “downgraded” to 144 hz 1440p displays because it fit what I actually wanted a bit better. Similarly, the above image is pulled from the Steam Hardware Survey and shows that the “average gamer” is still playing games in 1080p. While the most popular video card right now is the RTX 3060, most of the games that are being played don’t actually even support Raytracing. The cycle of constant hardware sales has been more about padding corporate bottom lines and fueling AI and Crypto growth, and less about what the players really wanted.

I think the biggest “L” of the Sony Presentation is that they didn’t really bring out any jaw-dropping definitive proof of what players would be getting for that hefty price tag. Instead of showing new games that can only really be achieved because of the technology of that upgraded console… they showed a bunch of older titles with marginal improvements. During the presentation, they stated that 2/3rds of all PlayStation gamers choose to play games in performance mode, rather than in fidelity mode. That feels extremely damning proof that players mostly care about the gameplay rather than the pretty graphics, because in truth… the graphics have been “good enough” since we got to the 1080p era. Basically, I feel like we have entered this era of diminishing returns, where the amount of extra money you pour into an experience is not equivalent to the extra amount of enjoyment that you gain from it.

I feel like another example of function over form, is the general popularity of the Steam Deck. This is effectively a gaming PC that runs at Nintendo Switch resolutions. The Steam Deck reportedly hit 3 million units sold in 2023, which is somewhat impressive considering how strained the available units were through the end of that year. Essentially the Steam Deck provides the performance of a budget laptop with integrated graphics, and folks are eating it up. It feels like it is way more about the polished nature of the Linux Steam OS distribution and the “consolification” of the entire PC Gaming ecosystem, than anything related to performance. There is also a massive amount of fun to be had in games that run at relatively low resolutions and with relatively few bells and whistles. Not to mention how much of a Console Emulation powerhouse the platform has become.

I also think there is a certain amount of hubris at play for Sony. They have been able to successfully raise the price of the PlayStation 5 in the Japanese market three times. This is the first time we are seeing what is an equivalent price hike hitting the North American and European markets. With the 60 million units sold of PS5, I feel like maybe Sony has been believing their own hype a bit recently. I am not sure if the negative reaction from the North American market will make any real changes. This combined with the colossal failure of Concord recently, should be a few shots across the bow that maybe players are not just going to take things as status quo anymore. It feels like a weird gamble considering during the presentation they stated that only around 15% of the total PlayStation 4 installed user base was on the Pro model during that generation. Maybe this console really is only for the bleeding-edge gamers who have to have the best of everything. However, I figured those users would have long since migrated to the PC platform where they can easily pour money into performance.

All of this said… I am clearly not the target demographic for this device. I spent 99.9% of my gaming time on the PC either on my gaming desktop or my gaming laptop. While I have a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X… they both spend more time collecting dust than they do actually serving as a gaming device. Most of the folks that I knew who were big into the PlayStation 4 Pro, were Destiny players… and when the PC Version of that game was released the majority of those migrated there for better performance. I am sure folks will buy this thing, but I am not sure how many will be actual players and how many will be scalpers trying to make a profit. Time will tell how this shakes out in the long run, but for the moment… I am seeing nothing but hatred about this announcement in my social feeds. I really do think we have reached a point where graphically things are “good enough” and instead folks would rather see a focus on gameplay than on shinier baubles. Of course… I might be entirely clueless here.

Cactuar Landed Gentry Again

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Good Morning Folks! Today was a rather fortuitous day… that quite honestly I was not expecting. At the beginning of this year, I lost my first home in Final Fantasy XIV. I got busy with Christmas and the New Year and just was not logging into the game… and apparently completely missed the email warning me. I was more than a little heartbroken, but I played it off as best as I could. There was something always weird about that plot of land though, because specifically, I went after plot 13… aka the plot that we used to have as a Free Company in The Mists before we upgraded to a Medium in Shirogane. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance however because my mind expected it to be our old home… but no matter what I did it never would be again. Nor did I have a fucking clue at all what various options we had set because Solaria the Guild Mom took care of all of that.

Pretty much every week since coming back before Dawntrail I have entered the housing lottery. What shocked me was just how much turnover there is on a server like Cactuar in the Aether Data Center. There was never a week where I did not have at least two or three different plots in different wards to choose from. I can only remember one week when there was nothing available on The Mists, aka my ward of choice. Hell, there were even three times that a version of Plot 13 came open again. I had been hitting this Timer website periodically to tell me if a new period opened or if it was time for me to check to see if I had won. Yesterday I was completely out of it and thus missed the opening of the results period. So this morning I logged in expecting to get a refund of my downpayment but instead… I had won the plot.

As such I have spent most of this morning getting things set up to where the home is functional again. The inside is extremely bare bones, and just has the necessary vendors and amenities like a guest book, summoning bell, and aesthetician… all of which I saved from my previous home. The outdoor furnishings are starting to get there, but I am sure I will continue to tweak and add little details. I’m in Ward 28 Plot 3 of The Mists on Cactuar, which is right around the corner from the Apartment building. This creates this funny situation where I have a market board to both sides of my home and an Aetheryte across the street from it. The neighborhood is really well built up, and so far I have seen zero signs of any nightclubs… so hopefully it is a chill relaxing place. There are a few nearby Free Company homes with extremely nice setups. One of which has all of the Gold Saucer machines in the basement… but alas I think only the FC members can play them.

I’ve had assorted visits from Free Company members this morning as they logged in to check on various things. They’ve also checked in on me to see how I was doing, given that I am still very much in the deep recovery mode with COVID-19. I am not doing much better, but I am also not really doing any worse so that is something. Here is a nice shot of me and Ammo hanging out on the roof… because being able to stand on your rooftop is really important for player housing. I have a phenomenal view of the entire district. I had to place some of the things just right so that I could jump up there since I did not have a nearby roof to drop down from above as I have had in other setups. More importantly, I have now set up a recurring calendar notification to remind me that I need to log in… with plenty of time to spare. When I get extra stressed out I can lose focus on pretty much everything in the world.

Now that the outside is starting to feel nice and cozy, it is time for me to begin to sort out what exactly I want to do for the inside. Speaking of cozy… ignore the fact that I am sitting out in the pouring rain on my stargazing deck. Essentially my game plan is to build out the downstairs as sort of a bedroom/training room/gear warehouse sort of feel befitting a warrior. Then the upstairs is going to be more of a public area with all of my vendors and maybe a bunch of bookcases and such. It will come together over time, but the outdoor features are always the most important so that I don’t stick out like an undecorated eyesore in my neighborhood. I am not going to try and do all of it over night, but I do want to keep poking away at it. Maybe this is what will finally drive me to finish training all of my crafting professions so that I can start making things rather than buying them.

Anyways… on the health side. I have two more days of this steroid dose pack of Prednisone, so I am hoping that today I will start to turn the corner. If not I will reach out to the doctor and maybe try and get either an extension or some other course of treatment. I am not doing any worse, but I certainly don’t really feel any better yet.