Visiting Strange Worlds

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Good Morning Friends. I apparently am just writing about Minecraft now, given that it represents most of what I played this weekend. I did some offline work on the “Bel Bungles” world but even there I am several episodes ahead that are queued up to release this week. Thing I have learned is I am apparently really bad at ignoring messages, or not so much willfully ignoring them but being oblivious to them existing. Somewhere buried in my DM inbox was a message from my friend Zelibeli complementing my Minecraft series and inviting me to go play on her server. This weekend I took her up on that invite and spent a good chunk of Sunday making a bit of a home.

She had an exceptionally pretty and functional main area to greet folks as they joined the server. I had not quite groked how to do screenshots at that point because all that seemed to happen was a Mojang loading screen image. After some googling I decided to instead rely on the built in screenshot functionality which is F2 and I hopped in really quickly this morning to take a few. I decided to head out from the spawn towards the nearest mountain…. and then claim it. I made my way up the sheer cliffside overlooking the swamp below and carved out my first hidey hole that ultimately has served as my base of operations in this world.

As picturesque as looking out over the balcony to the swamp below was… it wasn’t super functional. So my first order of operations was to dig a shaft down to ground level and then establish a “main” entrance off the forest floor below. This would also serve as an easier way to get any of the resources that I couldn’t find by hollowing out the mountain Dwarf style. Namely early on I would need a lot of wood and as such I proceeding to create a clearing that would serve a few purposes. Firstly of course wood but secondly it would allow me to see something coming and not be quite so surprised when a Skeleton or Zombie is waiting for me that didn’t quite get burned up from the sunlight.

I decided that I also wanted to have a way to grow some food. Zeli had provided me a super generous care package that included a Diamond Sword and Pick, along with a full suit of Chainmail and a stack of Pumpkin Pies. That said I don’t want to rely on the kindness of strangers forever so I needed a place to grow at least some modicum of food, along with providing a large amount of wheat for some later shenanigans. So from my hole in the wall I carved up to the summit of the mountain where I begin building a fort. It is very much in the “ugly but functional” stage of the build, but I will hopefully change that as time goes on. Unfortunately I am in a snow biome which means that I need to be careful with any free standing water. Currently I am using trapdoors to solve this problem but I am not sure happy with the torches placed on top of them.

From the Forest floor outpost I also decided to start digging another shaft downwards looping back upon itself heading towards bedrock so I could start the process of harvesting my own diamonds. Along the way however I encountered an abandoned Mineshaft which has ultimately distracted and dominated my play time. Firstly these are disturbingly dangerous to break, and I am starting to wonder if there is a cave spider spawner inside of this one. I hear them everywhere and that means I have to be super cautious given their EXTREMELY virulent poison. The other piece that I did not realize is just how rich in resources abandoned mines are. Sure there are the occasional carts with chests in them, but mine has an absolutely ridiculous amount of Iron in it. Not to mention the just casual resources like wooden structures and tracks. My goal is to eventually harvest everything I can get from this place before moving on.

The only negative about playing on a server, is in order to conserve resources it doesn’t load in chunks that you shouldn’t be interacting with… which means I can’t ACTUALLY see the main area from my home without someone hanging out over there and forcing those chunks to load in. You can however see the big communal farm, or at least part of it. I wanted to start somewhere at a distance from the main area but also close enough pending I wanted to go trade stuff to someone else. For now I am pretty happy with “Mount Belghast” that I am slowly working on. I noticed the swamp below spawns Slimes on occasion, which should make for easy sticky pistons when the time comes that I actually need some for a build.

My heart still belongs to my private world that I am using for recording the Minecraft series. However I do want to make a nice little presence in this shared world. Huge thanks to Zeli for inviting me to her world, I might at some point record a tour video once I get things working as intended.

AggroChat #332 – Why Games are Important

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Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

This evening’s show is a bit of an odd one, but we are living in very interesting times within other interesting times.  We start off with some discussion about choosing a game controller with a good D-Pad and how most just use 4 independent microswitches these days.  This leads into a discussion about Celeste and Kodra attempting B-Sides.  From there we talk about Crying Suns which effectively feels like a more mature version of FTL.  Then we deep dive into why Games are extremely important and what happens when “Players” start applying the same system breaking logic to the real world.  What we witnessed with the GameStop stock is precisely what gamers do best, evaluating a system, findings its weaknesses, and then exploiting the hell out of them for fun and profit.  This leads to one of the stranger conversations we have had but one that is nonetheless interesting.

Topics Discussed

  • Controllers with good D-Pads
    • Missing Retail for Testing Controllers
  • Celeste 3rd Anniversary
    • B-Sides
    • Classic 2
  • Crying Suns
    • FTL 2.0ish
  • Why Games are Important
    • GameStop Stock
    • Applying Game Breaking Principles to Real Life
    • Trolling the Stock Market
  • Changing Demands and Goals
    • The Fall of industries like Diamonds
    • The Rise of Electric Cars

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Recording Minecraft

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Today I will be releasing my sixth video in my Hardcore Minecraft series, and it represents the culmination of a few side projects and me stepping forth into a very changed Nether. That however is not exactly what I am going to talk about this morning. What I am going to talk about is how I don’t fully understand what lead me to start a Minecraft series after having been largely dormant on my YouTube channel with anything other than the weekly podcast videos for years. The last non-podcast video that I released was me trying to record evidence of an issue I was having with Avengers.

My Minecraft videos are relatively low quality as far as videos go. I am doing next to zero editing… and that is in part because the first few attempts at recording from OBS were using a format that I could not easily import into Adobe Premiere. I’ve since remedied this and that might shift up my workflow to do some stuff like add title cards to the beginning or something simple like that for starts. I like the concept of Streaming, but I always feel super anxious and awkward whenever I do it. I never know what to say and the fact that I am trying to interact with people makes the gameplay experience odd. Truth be told I don’t actually watch many streams and the only time I do tune in is for a few minutes when one of my already established friends is streaming.

I think the way I am recording short snippets of gameplay feels more comfortable because it is a lot like blogging. In order to sit down and make it through a blog post in the morning, I sorta pretend that I am just talking to myself. I am having an internal monologue and not something that is then going to get read by other people. I am letting you into my own thought processes and then just happening to write those down on paper, or in this case the digital page. For my Minecraft videos I have been trying to do the same sort of thing. I talk through what exactly I am doing and why I am doing it, and some of my long term goals.

The big thing that has sort of hampered me to this point is there are projects that I have that are ultimately going to be time consuming. Given that I am playing Hardcore… I have been super hesitant to do much of anything while the “camera” is not rolling for fear that something significant would happen and take place “off air”. However I think as I open up the world a bit more I am going to be spending more time working on those larger goals which are going to make my base feel like more of a home.

That is the other thing that has happened as I have been recording these episodes. I’ve found myself getting rather attached to this little hovel that I started with. I’ve never really started up on a hillside like this before, and I have to say I really like various aspects about it. The problem in the past has always been that it was very hard to tell if it was day time or night time because digging into the side of a mountain at ground level meant that something was always blocking my field of view. However being up high like this and overlooking the nearby village means that I actually have something resembling a proper view of the world.

This is the danger I guess of getting attached to something as fleeting as a hardcore world. There are ways of course to fix this, but they involve some shenanigans. I am enjoying myself and since I am absolutely allergic to trying to turn a profit from anything that I do… it isn’t like I actually need much of an audience to make it work for me. I’ve always sorta felt like an outsider artist that blogs, podcasts and now apparently records gameplay just for the fun of it and can not give two shits about how popular it is. That said I have been a bit shocked at just how many of you have been watching along as I did this particular brand of nonsense.

This is the playlist that I attempt to keep up to date as I release new videos. Right now I am shooting for 20-30 minute segments. They started rather long and have been getting a bit shorter as I recorded the last few of them. So here is the moment of letting you all behind the scenes… I am about to release episode 6 today, and I recorded 7 yesterday and will likely record 8 today. So I am a few episodes ahead of the release schedule at this point. This is going to get awkward as folks share advice because there is going to be a bit of a delay between when I read the comments and when I am next recording something.

As always I am going to plug the REAL person you should probably be watching as I am just a pale imitation. DavidAngel64 otherwise know as X, is the real reason why I am back engaged with Minecraft. In August of 2010 it was his “X’s Adventures in Minecraft” series that sold me on the experience of playing this game as an Adventure and I was completely hooked. As soon as I realized he was back playing the game, I was absolutely going to start watching these adventures on a daily basis. I am doing what I do because I enjoy it, but he is absolutely the real deal in a way that I likely never will be. I still find it criminal that this man does not have more subs than he does, because for me at least this is what started so many future hours of enjoyment. That original video has almost 5.5 million views so I am guessing that he was also the first entry into Minecraft for many people.

For now however I think I am going to keep doing what I am doing because I find a surprising amount of enjoyment from the process. What I am doing is not special or good but going through the motions is currently engaging for me. I sincerely doubt that I will ever gain much in the way of a following, but that is okay because I don’t really need that. I will never turn these hobbies of mine into a career and I have avoided monetizing any of them for fear of tax liability. So for now I am just going to keep piddling around and doing my thing, and apparently occasionally writing about it on the blog.

Knights of the Old Republic Rumors

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Over the last several days there has been quite a bit of information coming out about the potential of a game set in the Knights of the Old Republic currently in the works. The curious thing about these rumors is the fact that according to Jason Schreier the Dev Whisperer… it is supposedly being worked on outside of the greater EA/Bioware hegemony. Which leaves a whole bunch of questions about who and where and what. I almost tacked this bit of conversation onto yesterdays blog post but I also did not want to make that one span thirty pages of rambling. So this morning I am going to talk a bit about where we have been and where we are going.

While Darth Malak is the big baddie of Knights of the Old Republic, really for me it is the story of Darth Revan and his redemption arc. I say “his” because thanks to Star Wars the Old Republic we have a Canon Male Revan right or wrong. The first game legitimately changed so many things I thought a game like this could be and will likely always have a special place in my top games of all time. This represented the transition from Neverwinter Nights style top down isometric roleplaying games that I so regularly consumed and the later Mass Effect/Dragon Age style of third person environmental narrative driven experience. As I have been back playing KOTOR2 I have realized just how much of a period of transition these games truly were and as such were the heralds of so many things to come.

While I have not completed the game and there is a new big baddie in a cool mask, I would very much say that Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is STILL the story of Revan. The entirety of the game so far is effectively an epilogue to the first experience. You see the damage wrought by Revan on the galaxy and the fact that it isn’t doing too well on its own. The power vacuum of Revan going off into deep space to find his destiny left the Republic and Jedi Order without a charismatic leader to guide them into a new era. Generally speaking when a vacuum is formed someone else steps in to take the place but between the Mandalorian crusades and the Jedi Civil War… all larger forces that COULD step in were wiped out meaning what happens instead is a slow inevitable collapse of the galaxy.

There is some heavy debate about whether or not Star Wars the Old Republic the MMORPG counts as being part of the cycle of Knights of the Old Republic tales. I personally believe so and that is largely because it sets the ground work for the conflict to come and also reveals to us where exactly Revan went and what he was doing. Revan sensed something and went out to find it, and his struggle against that presence ultimately dominates much of the back story of Star Wars the Old Republic whether or not it is apparent and clear from the start. For me at least the true continuation of the KOTOR storyline would be the Jedi Knight story arc because it seems to deal the most directly with the Evil that Revan was trying to guard us from.

So ultimately the question is where do we go from here? As I stated before, I still firmly believe that Knights of the Old Republic is the story arc of Revan, and I think were they to continue the story it would need to take place after the events that have already played out in Star Wars the Old Republic. This causes a bit of a problem of bookending the story of a live service… but also it isn’t as though a lot of content is being delivered. There is also the option of setting the story in that time between the end of the Shadow of Revan expansion and the beginning of Knights of the Fallen Empire. There is a high likelihood of KOTFE and KOTET being washed away by the giant eraser of “Legends” as well.

Who Will Build It?

The first candidate that my friend Storm threw out there was Larian Studios. I absolutely think that they would do an amazing job with the franchise. However I also think this is a bit of a long shot given that they are already currently in active development of Baldur’s Gate III which expects to still have another year or so of incubation before release. Then after release I fully expect to see expansion content and more games in the D&D realm from this studio. Basically I think they are overcommitted at the moment given the size of the studio.

We already know that there is a deal in the works for the Massive division of UbiSoft to create an open world Star Wars game. However Massive is the studio behind The Division 1 and 2 and given the way that UbiSoft loves to make formulaic games I am fully expecting the Star Wars adventure to be in that model. I’ve said this before but I am expecting a single city setting like Nar Shaddaa or Coruscant where the entirety of the game takes place but also gives the player plenty of room to explore different environments. Hell I might be wrong here but I am expecting this one to also be off the table.

I personally would love to see what Spiders could do with the franchise given how phenomenal of a game Greedfall was. The problem with Spiders is that they have come really close to greatness a number of times but never quite pushed across the finish line. I think maybe with a high profile franchise like KOTOR, they might have the attention needed to make sure the final product was perfectly fine tuned. Again however this is a pipe dream because they were recently purchased by Nacon and duringa reveal show announced the next game they are working on. Steelrising looks awesome but is this baroque automata French revolution game that seems to be nothing like Knights of the Old Republic. They are a small studio and as such I think fairly single threaded so we can push them off the list.

Right now at this very moment I am playing a Knights of the Old Republic game built by Obsidian Entertainment. While they are now owned by Microsoft they have also been shown to not necessarily be building exclusive content. It would not be outside of the realm of reality for them to take over the franchise. To add fuel to the fire, Casey Hudson just left Bioware to join Microsoft Studios as Creative Director. He was the director on Knights of the Old Republic so maybe the cards are aligning in such a way as to have the franchise return to its Microsoft roots. If you remember KOTOR was originally an Xbox exclusive that later got a Windows release.

So in a bit of a dark horse pick, I want to throw out ArcheType Entertainment. This studio is backed by Wizards of the Coast and seems to be made up of a bunch of Ex-Bioware folks. One very key player would be Drew Karpyshyn the writer of KOTOR and some of the SWTOR content. Additionally James Ohlen and Chad Roberston were both in leadership roles over Star Wars the Old Republic and represent the Head of the Studio and General Manager respectively. The only thing that does not align is that when the studio was spun up in February of 2020 it was announced that they would be working on a brand new Science Fiction IP. Maybe fates shifted and the break up of the EA Star Wars license opened up other opportunities to pivot what they were working on into the Old Republic setting.

Another studio that I would not rule out either is InXile entertainment. These are the folks the modern Wasteland and Bards Tale games as well as Torment: Tides of Numenera. As a studio their jam seems to be really good isometric roleplaying games. However they would also have the same Microsoft connection that Obsidian has. I think this is a really long shot however because the wealth of their experience is in modernizing the isometric genre and creating games that feel like we remember the classic PC RPG era feeling. It is because of this nostalgia based approach that I am not really certain they would be screwing with the formula just yet, that is unless they themselves are feeling like the isometric thing is getting a bit stale.

It’s All Rumors

The problem with all of this is the fact that right now none of it is tangible. For all we know it could be Aspyr working on remastering and modernizing Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. Excitement is getting the better of games media and myself included. I would love to see a new Knights of the Old Republic game, but also I know it is probably two or three years out there if it even ends up happening. So friends, what are your thoughts? Who do you think might be developing this game and what sort of game are you expecting it to be? Do you think it will be a continuation of the KOTOR lineage or just something new set in the same Old Republic era setting? Drop me a line below, because I am curious about your thoughts.