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I did not do much in the gaming front last night as I spent the evening watching Shazam.  Firstly this movie is pure joy, and I really wish we had more super hero movies that could tell a good story while also maybe not pushing the envelope quite so far into Warhammer 40k Grim Dark future timeline.  I realize this maybe only works for a movie like Shazam where you have childhood wonder mixed with instant super hero powers.  Basically I loved it and want more of it, however I am not sure if you can bottle the same sort of lightning twice with a sequel.  So far however this is probably my favorite DC movie?  For reference the other two that I really love are Aquaman and Wonder Woman…  so your mileage may vary if those were not your movies.  I never really thought the Heath Ledger Joker was that amazing even though he delivered a pretty great performance…  I loved the first movie in that series and they sorta went downhill from there for my personal tastes.

What I find weird is the situation we are in right now where DC is decidedly the more gritty movie series, which seems to be the exact opposite of my experience reading the comics growing up.  Marvel was the one that had more “realism” and DC was filled with a large number of what I would consider hapless Pollyannas.  Movie wise we have the polar opposites going on, where Marvel gives us movies that deliver both crushing sadness but also moments of pure joy and DC has given us “MAAAAARTHAAAAAAA”.  I was never really a follower of Shazam or “DC Captain Marvel” depending on how you choose to refer to the character, and I think in many ways that helps with the joy.  I went into Guardians of the Galaxy knowing only the most basic of information about those characters and was super fine with whatever tweaks they took to get them on the screen.  For Shazam as far as I am aware they represented the character pretty well, but I also don’t know a ton of information and as a result wouldn’t know if they completely butchered something…  or care.

There are definite times where our geek cred gets in the way of our enjoyment of things.  I’m sure you have experienced moments where you are watching some pop culture recreation of something you loved growing up… and they completely failed at some small piece of it.  Then that small piece works at the back of your brain until it starts to color your opinion of the thing as a whole.  You don’t want it to happen but it sort of happens automatically without you meaning to, and the next thing you know you are spitting venom about whatever that thing is.  I still personally find it hard to reconcile the Star Wars prequels for example, even though I realize they aren’t as bad as I originally thought they were.  Also there are moments like when you listen to the actor who played Jar Jar Binks…  and hear what hell he went through all over a bunch of fans galvanizing disappointment into something far more dangerous and militant.

Ultimately us geeks need to reach a point where we are capable of taking our loves not quite as seriously as we do.  That is the core problem with a lot of the toxicity that I see online… is when disappointed love turns to hatred.  Example…  I am trying very hard not to allow myself to become that guy with Anthem even though I have already waded knee deep into those waters on many occasions.  It is hard when your hope turns sour and you start lamenting all of the things that could have been… rather than focusing on the things that exist and are good.  I think the opposite is also bad where you have a sort of toxic positivity that everything is fine and everything is working as intended.  I think we need to reach a point where we can accept the fact that occasionally our heroes will let us down and that a lot of things will never quite live up to our expectations.  I am trying to get to that place myself honestly, but the fact that I realize I am being unreasonable is probably the first step.  The problem is…  it feels good to ruminate on that anger especially when it comes in the form of snarky semi-anonymous posts on some message board or YouTube comment section.

The long story short… I loved Shazam and would love to see more movies like this.  Not necessarily more Shazam movies… but more super hero movies that are capable of embracing joy.  Weirdly one of the other movies that sorta fits these guidelines is Deadpool, which is a fairly joyous movie…  in spite of the body count and ribaldry.  I feel like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies also were very much in this same style as was Thor Ragnarok and the Antman movies.  I want more movies that make me feel like I can ignite the spark of hope inside of me… rather than simply wallowing in the fact that the world is shit and will always be shit.  All I have really seen is some reports that the movie did not live up to expectations…  but then again much like with a video game release I am wondering if those expectations are deeply inflated and unrealistic.  It is a good movie and if you need something that invokes pure joy in your life…  then I highly suggest checking it out…  especially if you loved John Hughes movies.

I’ve spent more time this morning talking on twitter than actually working on a blog post.  I’m still very much in that state where I am fighting something…  be it a cold or something worse.  The hammer has not quite slammed down on me, but I feel like I am on the cusp of really getting sick.  My wife has continued to cough like mad pretty much every night to which I often say “Please don’t die” and she will angrily respond between coughs “I’m Not Dying!”.  She also won’t really go seek assistance either…  which admittedly were the roles reverse I probably wouldn’t either.  Still it is painful to hear her cough like that, and with my own fucked up immune system…  I know that it is just a matter of time until I will be doing the same.  As a precaution I have been trying to push fluids hard and get extra sleep…  but the second point doesn’t exactly make for interesting topics to talk about in the morning when you barely played any games the night before.

One of the things about yesterdays luke warm take on not really caring about Epic Games exclusives that I did not fully estimate…  was just how much hatred folks in general seem to have about a game like Borderlands 3 going exclusive on that platform.  The latest is a rumor that Epic Games is now doing something to block launching under steam as a “non-steam game”.  One of the arguments by supporters of Epic Games has been that you can still launch the games under Steam if you really just wanted to put them all in one location.  Were this rumor true it would seem that someone on one side or the other was actively taking moves to ward against this.  As someone who has three titles installed through the launcher I figured I would do some detective work.  For reference those titles are Fortnite which I picked up prior to the Battle Royale version because it was a game that I had been following in development.  The next is Ashen which is a platform exclusive and a game I very much wanted to try out.  The last is Hades which was ultimately the game that made me have that “whelp I guess I am installing this launcher” moment because I absolutely love Super Giant Games.

The game that this rumor is circulating around however is Metro Exodus, that I did not purchase on any platform because quite frankly I don’t have the bandwidth to play it.  I am maybe finally learning my lesson to put of purchases until I am actually going to do something with the damned game.  So this is not necessarily going to be a fair test of the complaint that is circulating, but this should be a test if the launcher itself is blocking access to the games in some manner.  For the uninitiated you can effectively add any game to steam by going up to the “Games” menu at the top and choosing “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library”.  This ends up bringing up the dialog above and sure enough… none of the three Epic Games Launcher games were showing up in the menu in spite of it seemingly bringing up every other executable on my system.  Curiouser and Curiouser.

I am one of those weirdos that allows every game to drop an icon on my desktop, so I decided to check out what exactly Hades was launching.  When you look into the shortcut you see something that is complete gibberish and that potentially only the Epic Games Launcher has any idea what to do with it.  “com.epicgames.launcher://apps/Min?action=launch&silent=true” is not something that steam can launch seeing as it is looking for some sort of executable.  I remember installing Hades to my bulk storage drive and the “Games” directory and sure enough I quickly found its directory.  Underneath was an X64 and a X86 directory and inside of each was an executable called “Hades.exe”.  So with path in hand I used the browse option to manually add this to steam and sure enough it launched the game as expected.

Now you can do this with games that are purchased through platforms like UbiSoft’s UPlay, but there is almost always the caveat that you need to have the Games Launcher running in the system tray in order for the game to successfully launch.  In the case of UPlay even games you purchased THROUGH Steam itself… have to have the Uplay client running to access.  To test this theory further I decided to hard kill the Epic Games Launcher and make sure nothing remained of it in memory.  Unexpectedly…  Hades still launched fine and even managed to get the Steam Overlay successfully over the top of the game play.  The above screenshot is originally 4K resolution scaled down to 1080p so I could actually upload it to my blog, but you will see the tiny overlay window from steam in the lower right hand corner happily over top of Hades.

Maybe this was a fluke specific to the way Hades was developed, so I decided to try it again and go for a Ashen this time which is another platform exclusive title.  Same process as above, I had to go find the actual game executable but once I knew its location I was able to browse to it through the “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library” dialog.  Again the game launched fine and again the steam overlay showed up in the lower right hand corner.  So the 25 year plus of experience technologist in me says… that this isn’t a behavior baked into the launcher itself.  I am not saying that something shady isn’t happening, just not necessarily the behavior that folks seem to be indicating.  I do find it weird that Steam seemingly refuses to find the executables for any of the games that I have installed through the Epic Games launcher, but has picked up like all of my Adobe Products…  all of the Asus apps that came with my Motherboard drivers…  Skype…  every single MMO and all of the games that installed through Origin.  Steam literally ONLY excluded the Epic Games titles which was bonkers.

The funny thing is about today’s post…  I have already written more words about the Epic Games store than I ever intended to.  I am not going to defend it because really I don’t care.  I used to have extreme loyalty to Steam as a platform, but originally it was a pretty great place to find new games.  I valued its discovery system to help me find titles that I might be interested in.  Lately however all of the really poor and asset flip titles clogging the platform…  has made it extremely hard to find anything.  So often its discovery system now gives me games “because it is popular” and not actually based on any past purchase or play history that I have had.  Steam isn’t exactly doing a great job…  but the problem is…  nobody else is either.  I admit I like the more curated experience of Epic Games because it has so many orders of magnitude fewer titles than Steam.  Ultimately at the end of the day I will buy the game in whatever digital platform it is available on… and for Ubisoft titles for example I have stopped buying them through steam entirely and just go through the Native launcher since I will have to have it running in the background regardless to play the games.

I didn’t have anything better to talk about this morning, and I spent most of my writing time researching this nonsense…  so you are getting it as the daily post.  Please note… I am not trying to dissuade you from hating Epic Games or video game exclusivity.  You can hate anything you want and there is plenty of ammo on either one of those stances.  However the rumor floating around that Epic Games is actively blocking launching games through steam…  does not appear to have any validity.   I launched two exclusive titles through steam this morning both with and without the Epic Games launcher running in the background.  In both cases it just worked without problems.  Since Metro Exodus is the game in question and I do not own it… I cannot diagnose what is going on there.  It could be that 4A Games or Deep Silver is doing something to block the Steam process from launching their executable, but again I can’t test this.  I can say that in my opinion it isn’t actually the launcher at fault.

This morning I am going to apologize to anyone who actively reads either my Twitter feed or my Fediverse feed.  Those tend to be the platform where I make extemporaneous commentary and in the moment reactions to whatever happens to be on my mind.  Often time those statements end up getting distilled down into a blog post once more time and distance has passed.  Yesterday I spouted off in thread form on Twitter about the Activision/Blizzard layoffs and this morning I still feel the need to talk about it so I am cobbling together something in blog post form.  For those who have not been following this story it has been something looming on the horizon for awhile as Blizzard had gone into cost cutting measures and offered a number of employees buyout packages to voluntarily leave the company.  So these actions are something we had all been fearing would be happening, especially after the massive stock hit that came with the announcement of Bungie’s departure from the agreement with the publisher.

For those who have not been following this…  it was not a great year for Activision Blizzard as a whole in the public opinion area, however this did not stop them from making record profits this past year.  In 2017 they had a net profit of $273 million and in 2018 they realized a record $1.8 billion dollars in profit.  This is what makes the 800 layoffs feel all the more like “Snidely Whiplash tying Nell to the railroad tracks” evil.  I’ve not been able to verify as of yet who is and is not effected from the folks that I knew who were still working for Blizzard.  However among my circle of friends a good number of those friends of friends got the axe.  This whole sequence has been extremely frustrating and depressing to see play out on social media as so many people are scrambling to find a home in another studio.  Based on a few examples told to me in confidence, it appears that a good chunk will be trying to make their exit from games development in general for sake of stability.

There is a medium article that came out yesterday from Patrick Beja that is worth reading that goes over his thoughts about the whole situation and summarizes some statements that he had made earlier in the lead up.  There are a couple of specific sections that struck a chord with me, but I call one out in particular.

The other thing I often hear is “they’re only developing F2P mobile games that SUCK”. First, we don’t know they’ll suck. And second, I don’t know why they’d stop developing PC games that make money. Did you not enjoy Overwatch or Hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm? If you didn’t, you haven’t liked Blizzard for a long time… But if you did, maybe you’ll think the next PC games they release will be good too.

This was something that was hard to hear because since the release of Starcraft Blizzard has been a company that I held up on a pedestal as being quite possibly the ultimate end goal of what working in the games industry could be like.  I have obsessed over so many over their games and loved the artistry and craftsmanship that went into them.  However seeing that statement in print made a point ring true.  I love the Blizzard of the past and not necessarily the Blizzard of the here and now.  Now we are not talking about expansion content here…  but the last new game that they released that I have really enjoyed on a large level was Diablo 3 from 2012.  That means that for the last seven years they have not produced something that really interested me.  While I have rabidly eaten up every bit of expansion content for Diablo 3…  World of Warcraft and I have a much spottier record with liking some expansions like Legion and largely loathing some expansions like Cataclysm.  Effectively though…  I didn’t so much love Blizzard but instead loved those two games.

To preface some of what I have said in thread form…  Overwatch is a universe that I really like but with a game attached to it that I have no real interest in playing.  Hearthstone was a game I was interested in and dabbled with occasionally… but all of that interest died the moment I got my hands on MTG Arena and got what I had wanted all along.  Heroes of the Storm academically is a better game for me than League of Legends…  but I don’t really like either enough to play them on a regular basis and I have no interest at all in solo queuing.  Battle for Azeroth was probably the thing that caused Blizzard the most damage in my eyes because it went in the opposite direction that I wanted the franchise to go.  Legion gave me hope of us moving towards a class based narrative and away from the big dumb red versus blue crap we have had forced upon us for years.  However the narrative felt hollow and the gameplay was not really interesting enough to keep me attached to it as everything felt like rehashed versions of things we had already seen in one form or another before.

Diablo is the franchise that Blizzard created that I probably care the most about, and the handling of the Immortal announcement stung.  I am actually looking forward to that game, because I think it will be something fun to play from bed while I drift off much like I do currently with Dragalia Lost.  However we are hungry for more core Diablo gameplay and every year I have waited with so much built up hope for the eventual announcement of Diablo 4 that never quite comes.  Now I am more or less tired of waiting and have redoubled my efforts to explore the various alternatives like Torchlight Frontiers, Pagan Online and games I already have access to like Grim Dawn.  I fully support the Diablo team because they caught a bullet that was not necessarily intended for them.  However that does not mean my personal goodwill and hopefulness did not take a hit.

The layoffs have really driven home how disconnected I have become from Blizzard games in general.  Right now the only thing in the Blizzard launcher that sees much in the way of playtime is Destiny 2, and it is one of those games in limbo since Bungie left the fold.  I made an attempt to start this season of Diablo 3 but for various reason I never really latched onto it and didn’t even make it a quarter of the way to the level cap.  I’ve not really played World of Warcraft since October, in spite of logging in one or twice in November…  and effectively logging right back out again.  Blizzard currently is not producing anything that is really exciting me, and I am finding that excitement in other places which is nothing terribly new to be honest.  I have always been a WoW Tourist over the years… where I would disappear for a few months but return eventually to keep playing.  That said however the longest that I have gone without playing the game since 2012 is a couple of four month long breaks.

Unless there is a drastic change in direction that makes significant effort to bury the hatchet of the dumb faction conflict storyline…  I am not sure if I will be back.  Battle for Azeroth is the first World of Warcraft expansion not to make the AggroChat Games of the Year show, and quite honestly it is the first expansion I regret pre-0ordering and playing.  The future of me and Blizzard largely hinges upon if they make good on giving me a Diablo game that I want, which is a sorta depressing thing to say.  One thing that I want to talk about at the end however is that I don’t blame anyone other than myself for this.  I think the workers at Blizzard need our support desperately right now, because it has to be a very scary time for those who survived this round of cuts.  For those who didn’t…  we need to do whatever we can to help them out during this transition.

That is a point that I have always made throughout the years is that even if I am struggling to like a company…  it has nothing to do with how I feel about its employees.  Everyone works their asses off to make the best damned game they can.  When we talk badly about their work, it often feels like a kick in the gut after they probably gave up so much of their own life to crunch through the release of that product.  I see you all out there and appreciate what you try your level best to provide me a fun entertainment experience.  I am always reluctant when I start criticizing something because I don’t want it to feel like I am kicking the poor folks who helped to build it.  Lets be honest… many of us had daydreams of working in the games industry.  However I saw early on that it was not exactly a path of stability and I went down a path that would give me that security blanket that I craved.  That does not however mean that I don’t respect the fuck out of everyone that is making these games for me…  and for people who are not my specific arrangement of tastes.

The take away from this post is not that Blizzard is bad because we have grown apart.  I just find it weird that I can say something like that and actually mean it.  I am however frustrated with the hell that is being unleashed upon the good people that make up the company.  If you ever need someone to talk to my DMs are open.

Last night was a really weird night for me, where I spent a significant amount of time doing things OTHER than playing games.  I logged into Final Fantasy XIV pretty early but had the very annoying fight that I had been struggling with the night before ahead of me.  So I found myself alt tabbed out of Parsec and doing other things…  like watching a whole bunch of videos on YouTube.  Yesterday was one of those days where everything was stacked together so tightly that I felt like I was jumping from meeting to meeting without any real pauses between… and before I knew it was 5:30 and I felt like I had accomplished nothing.

When I got home I fixed us some dinner and largely went into a vegetative state, and part of this was avoiding actually doing the thing that I logged into Final Fantasy XIV to do that night.  On some level I think I just couldn’t handle the failure that was inevitably going to happen.  However around 9 ish I finally started working on the quest and sure enough I failed the first attempt.  However on the second try I made it through to the Y’shtola phase…  which honestly seemed really hard to fail.  It was an interesting encounter but way the hell to long, and the margins for failure were way the hell to slim for a story quest.  I am however up to patch 4.5 which I believe is still the latest story content patch, and will likely begin that tonight.

In case you're curious, I took 800 of the 1,800+ replies (because limited time in the day!) and categorized the responses. Overwhelmingly, most folks who prefer to play solo, do so because of other players. A sad statement about online toxicity that games need to better address. pic.twitter.com/RURpo8AnZs

— Emily (aka Domino) Taylor (@pentapod) February 11, 2019

The other day Pentapod/Dominoposted a twitter poll of sorts asking players why they prefer to play otherwise multiplayer games solo.  This is a bit of a loaded topic and I chimed into the thread with my own thoughts but never quite made them in a blog format.  The above twitter post includes the follow up that shows that the vast majority of the reasoning behind why…  is issues of player toxicity.  For me personally it is a bit more nuanced than that but toxicity is definitely a huge problem that keeps me away from any game where voice chat with strangers is forced or at least heavily suggested.

For me the issue comes from something that I have noticed over the years and have talked a bit about on this blog.  The more responsibility I have thrust upon me in the real world…  the less I want to be entangled with it in the virtual world.  When I was working thankless dead end jobs, I looked to World of Warcraft, the House Stalwart Guild and the then Duranub Raiding Company raid to provide me structure in my life and give me some semblance of control.  However as I moved jobs and arrived at a place where I was deeply appreciated… and as a result given more and more responsibility…  I found myself withdrawing significantly from guild leadership and even recently from raiding at all.

When I group with other players I feel responsible for not only myself but for the enjoyment of others.  I am just wired that way and I think it is in part why I have always leaned on tanking classes as my window into the virtual world.  However since January of last year I have had fifteen human beings relying on me every single day for their survival and job satisfaction at work…  I just cannot handle going home at night and taking on that responsibility for putting myself out there to organize things.  As a result I have found myself spending almost all of my time playing solo in MMORPGs or playing some truly single player gaming experience.  I traded that responsibility for others that I used to cherish in games…  for applying those same guild and raid leader skills to the workplace.

The end result however is frustrating because I have found myself withdrawing from even what I would consider the safest of places and instead erecting mental blocks against those activities that thrust me in with a bunch of other players.  I’ve found it extremely difficult to bring myself to queue as my Warrior main in FFXIV because I am just not sure if I can deal with having to feel responsible for the success or failure of an encounter.  The time-shift for the Seattle crew has also harmed this a bit, but there is a significant gathering of East and Central players in the Final Fantasy XIV free company that would be more than willing to do anything I ever wanted to do with me.

At some point I have to rip the band-aid off and get back into the swing of things.  However there are so many nights like last night where I allow myself to find alternate diversions.  I am looking forward to Anthem as some what of a clean start.  However I spent almost all of my time in the demo playing alone, either doing missions solo or roaming around aimlessly in free play.  However on the Anthem front… reminder that you can begin loading the game through Origin at Noon Central today.