I’ve been piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, but have largely languished without a real purpose. This weekend I guess I got a sense of purpose and managed to push my Machinist up to level 50 with darkest dungeon. I had been piddling around during the podcast in Palace of the Dead for a few weeks now, but largely just wound up running around the top of the wall in Quarymill while we talked. I refer to this activity as Dalaran-ing because anytime I would need to talk to someone in game I would find myself running laps around whichever incarnation of Dalaran was in World of Warcraft at the time. I find I do the same with Final Fantasy XIV hubs, and I greatly miss the running friendly walls that our old Free Company house used to have.
As it stands I have every class that is currently in the game above the level of 50, which in theory should allow me to massively clean my vaults and get rid of anything lower level that isn’t particularly cool looking or at least dyeable. I did dump a ton of stuff into ye olde glamour commode, and was pretty happy to see that we are getting an increase in storage space with the upcoming Shadowbringers update. At this point I have dumped every Axe and Katana that I care about keeping as those two classes are already at the level cap. I need to start working my way backwards through my weapon archives and saving anything that I particularly want to keep. Inventory management is the bane of my existence in most MMORPGs and FFXIV is no exception sadly.
After tooling around on my Machinist I decided to push Bard up to 60… at which point something started to bother me greatly. At the end of everything I have completed I get a warning telling me I am capped on Tomestones of Poetics. This lead me down a path of trying to research ways I can spend said Poetics… which lead me back to the original expense that I had previously used them for… Books. I never finished doing books for my Bravura Animus. In fact right now I could not tell you where I am exactly in that process, but I am working my way through a speed book that involves a FATE that apparently never spawns.
So there it is folks. I am making poor life choices and apparently drawn back into piddling around with my Zodiac weapon. I solo’d my way through several dungeons last night and at current moment find myself just needing to do Amdapor Keep and get a FATE in Coerthas to spawn that seemingly doesn’t want to. I figure at some point I will have to start farming down the FATEs that have popped since I believe every zone has a limited number up at a given time. This is apparently what I am doing with my life now… in this lead up to Shadowbringers. Sadly I have not even begun to go through madness because I still have to do my melding materia step. The good news however is that I probably won’t be able to complain about not having something to spend my Poetics on shortly.
Over the course of this week my blog has largely been devoted to E3 show coverage, or at least that thing that I call coverage where I talk about the things I personally cared about. In the background it has also been a pretty crazy week with a good deal of my time going to trying to catch up all on things E3 instead of actually playing games. This was only complicated by the fact that Tuesday night I went to the rebroadcast of RiffTrax live which is all sorts of wrong name-wise. Then on Wednesday night we met some of my in-laws for an early Father’s Day dinner. Which largely left Monday and last night free… but Monday I more or less spent the night cobbling together the footage needed for the Tuesday post.
Over the weekend I finally reached a point where I was ready to make a run at the Avarice Conquest. For the uninitiated this conquest requires you to hit a 50,000,000 gold streak which means every couple of seconds you need to be looting more gold to keep it active. There are a few ways to do this in game, but the most sure fire method requires copious amounts of farming. Since this takes so much time I absolutely went for the overkill method and gathered up a vault and a half worth of stuff… or in my case 8 rows of 7 caches equally 56 bounty caches.
Now the gotcha here is that a bounty cache retains a memory of what difficulty it was looted on and I started banking the caches when I first became able to farm Torment 13 and quickly worked my way up to 15 and 16… and had not really been paying much attention as to which difficulty I got them on. The key to doing this is to dismiss your companion and dismiss your pet… then stand beside your stash and be ever so careful to not touch anything until you are ready to go. I started by loading every bounty I could fit into my inventory and then reloaded the rest without moving at all. For sake of my own sanity I held down the Shift button while opening the Stash to make sure the game would not accept a movement input from me.
The real challenge however… was doing the cleanup. What you see above is somewhat of a lie, because each one of those items actually represents a stack. At this point I had completed a Solo Greater Rift 80 which I believe took my blood shard capacity up to 1300, and I am pretty sure I made twenty trips between Kadala and the bloodshard pile before I finally farmed those down. I probably crunched over a hundred legendaries and I have no clue at all how much I had in the way of crafting materials. Which is good because I also needed the various Kanai’s Cube related achievements as well. I am essentially in a point with Season 17 where I have knocked out a good chunk of most of the remaining steps, but need to spend some time playing clean up and actually start finishing them. I need two more conquests, and I have not even set my signs on what those are going to be yet.
The other game I have spent a bit of time in lately is Destiny 2 and I am largely working on getting my light level up enough to be able to feel like I have some semblance of choice weapon wise. Right now I am largely just using whatever trash happens to drop with a higher level because I do not have a great stockpile of infusion materials. Now the interesting part of this is that I have picked up some weapons that I have found I actually enjoy and probably never would have played with otherwise… like the submachine gun I am current wielding in my primary slot.
I still find it very hard to get into the Crucible, and whereas I played Gambit constantly it feels like the queues for standard gambit are extremely long. I am however trying to plug away at the various tasks that will give me “powerful gear”. Like I knocked out the planetary quest last night and did a heroic adventure… then plugged away a bit at the crucible related bounties. I will say it is really odd getting to the activity tracker off the map screen because I keep wanting to see it on my inventory. Quite honestly I would prefer if they put that tab in both places, because it takes a lot of retraining to stop looking for those items in my inventory. Still having an awful lot of fun in Destiny 2, but I probably should be playing Final Fantasy XIV and prepping for the impending launch of Shadowbringers.
What have you been playing on regular rotation? Drop me a comment below.
At this point we are out of the big shows that are associated with the lead up to E3. Now we are left with whatever happens to leak out of the show floor or through the various extended meet and greet streams that so many of the “networks” happen to be running. At this point I have talked about Stadia, EA Play, Microsoft, Bethesda, PC Gaming, UbiSoft and Square Enix. That simply leaves the lone standout from Tuesday… Nintendo and their latest Nintendo Direct.
Nintendo Direct E3 Show
There are a lot of folks that feel like Nintendo “won” E3 and I will admit it was a packed show. However along the lines of EA Play it was packed with a bunch of stuff that I didn’t necessarily care about. Two of the big reveals were related to Smash Bros, which is not really a game that excites me. Other than that we got some dates for games that had been in the pipeline, but it failed miserably because the one game I wanted more information on and or a release date… was completely absent. I am all about Metroid which is still more or less missing in action.
The Legend of Zelda – Link’s Awakening Remake
One of the highlights of the show is that we saw more footage of the Link’s Awakening remake and with it got a firm release date of September 20th 2019. There isn’t a lot to say here other than I am looking forward to playing it. I never played the original on the Gameboy as I had moved on to other things at the time. I would love to see more games get the remake treatment that look as gorgeous as this one does.
Panzer Dragoon Remake
This was definitely a shocker title, because it appears to be a remake of the Sega Saturn Panzer Dragoon title. I mean these were fun back in the day because it was a 3D shooter while on back of a Dragon. It does make me wonder if we are also going to get a remake of Nights into Dreams on the Switch given that it ran on I think the same engine? I can’t tell if this is a remake or a remaster to be be honest. Regardless it is really cool to see this showing up.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I’ve never played a proper Animal Crossing title, but I did enjoy Pocket Camp quite a bit until I wandered away from it like I do most mobile games. I have been looking forward to this being my first title in the series to play so I am hoping it is excellent. Graphics wise everything looks awesome so far. I am not as pumped as some people might be for the title given again… I’ve never really played a mainline game in the series.
Contra Rogue Corps
I am mostly including this one because… first off I was shocked to see a Contra game at the show. Secondly it looks like absolute shit and I am wondering if this is something that had been in the works for the 3DS and then was later re-purposed to be a Switch game. The textures are blurry and muddy, and the color palette is complete nonsense. This just does not inspire much confidence. Coming back to this… after looking at the PS4 trailer it looks like this is just a shitty port to the switch because the Sony version looks way better.
Trials of Mana – Seiken Densetsu 3 Remake
Just like I was excited to see Romancing SaGa 3 get a proper localization I am very happy to see this game get a localization and a remake. This has been on the list of games I wanted to play for ages since the Super Nintendo era when I found out it existed but only in Japanese. Not a lot to say, it looks good and it also looks like the cast of characters have been represented from what I can remember as faithfully. The positive about a lot of these 16 bit era Japanese games is there was an awful lot of artwork that existed to be used as a reference.
Unnamed Breath of the Wild Sequel
Now we really shouldn’t be shocked at this announcement, but at the very end of the Nintendo direct they showed off that they were working on a Breath of the Wild Sequel. Now the internet or maybe just my twitter feed… seems to be losing their shit over short haired Zelda. Then again it is mostly just Ryuhkin generating most of those retweets. There had been rumors that they were planning on building a new story in the same engine and get it to market quickly, but now we have confirmation of that. Something definitely to look forward to but past that not an awful lot to go on yet.
General Thoughts on E3 2019
So at this point I sorta want to sit back and talk about E3 2019 as a whole, which I realize the show itself won’t be over until the weekend. However for the gamers at home the “show” is effectively all of the presentations leading up to the actual events. There were really two takeaways that I had, the first being that the absence of Sony was noticeable and felt really weird to have a vacuum from team blue. The second big take away is that in general it was a down year with what it feels like everyone preparing for the next console generation which by all looks seems to be targeting Holiday 2020.
I would have to go back and check my notes from the various E3 presentations of the past, but it definitely feels like this might be the first year when nothing really surprised me. What I mean by that is always in the past it seemed like there was a game that had come from out of left field and gave a demo or a slick marketing video that made me extremely giddy inside. That just didn’t happen this go around, and it could be the sign of a bunch of things. Maybe the industry has moved away from whatever games really made me tick, or maybe like I said before this is just an in-between year.
Regardless the end result is a very let down feeling after exiting E3 season. That is not to say there won’t be a lot of awesome things coming out during 2019, but we already knew about them ahead of time. I guess indicates that companies are retracting around the importance of E3 as a construct. Activision/Blizzard was a complete no show during the proceedings and so many of the games that I didn’t necessarily talk about… had been announced and were already deeply ingrained in the zeitgeist before the show happened. For an industry that used to revolve around E3 and CES… it seems like neither holds any importance at all these days which is bizarre as a gamer.
Early on I gave the analogy of the Christmas Catalog or the Toys R Us Big Book… and I guess it continues to be apt. Those are both things that faded over time as they lost significance and importance to the consumers. Similarly it seems that the E3 show is fading as they are no longer the primary vehicle of delivering information to the customers for the coming year. Nintendo Direct and shows like it seems to be the way we are heading. On one level I like getting little bits of information throughout the year within months of the release of a product. It feels good to know that the thing you just saw is going to be in your hands within a few weeks time.
However there is a part of me that misses the pomp and circumstance of having this big show meaning so much. That said of all of the shows I have to give credit to Microsoft probably being my favorite. They showed a lot of great games and gave a vision of being able to play those games on whatever platform you wanted to with XCloud. They also announced what the future was going to be with the Scarlett product, and because of all of that the E3 format still seems to be working well for them.
As far as a second place I would probably place Square Enix and Nintendo in a tie because they also delivered really great presentations. The worst is EA Play which is not shocking because I often time place EA at the bottom. However I was shocked to see just how bad the UbiSoft presentation was this year, given that is usually firmly in the middle of the pack. Bethesda did a fine job of displaying the titles that they had to show off, but it most definitely felt like an in-between year for them. I guess the ultimate question is… when is Sony going to do their own console reveal? Additionally after the sluggishness of E3 2019 and the financial troubles reported surrounding the convention… will there be an E3 2020?
So after seeing all of the shows at this point, which was your favorite? What were your general thoughts about E3 as a whole? Leave me a comment below.
This morning we are going to take a brief break from my daily recap posts in part because I was not home last night, nor have I watched the last of the shows put on by Nintendo. I know a handful of the titles that were announced, and I also know that I am a sad panda because nothing was said about Metroid Prime 4. Until I have time to digest what was announced and more importantly capture screenshots from it… we are going to have to delay the final post in that series. However the topic of screenshots has come up a few times in regards to my posts so it inspired today’s more informational post.
Every screenshot that you have seen to date from the E3 coverage posts for better or worse is something I have captured myself. There was at time when I would attempt to rely on shots being spread around as part of press kits. The problem there however is that they were often times all completely different sizes which made my eye twitch. Instead I went down a path of madness to try and figure out how to easily capture video stills without loading all of the videos into an editor like premiere.
The result of this search lead me to a tool I was already using… VLC or VideoLAN Client which like a good number of open source projects is a fairly utilitarian name for what it is. Ultimately its beginning roots are that of a simple video player that has morphed into a Swiss army knife of video related tools. Need to apply subtitles to a video and render the final product out as a flattened MKV file… VLC can do that. Need to resize video or swap between formats… VLC can do that too. However for our purposes we are going to focus on the fact that VLC can play network streams and allow you to capture easy screenshots.
First off you are going to need a copy of the software and for that you can head over to VideoLAN.org. There are official releases for Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, a ton of Linux distributions and a slew of other random platforms. Hell you can get a version of VLC that runs happily on OS/2… which if you are using OS/2 still you maybe have more problems than taking screenshots of E3 presentations. Regardless grab your copy, install it… and we are wanting specifically to talk about the “Open Network Stream” functionality that can be accessed with Ctrl+N in windows platforms.
From there you are going to enter some manner of network stream bit it a YouTube URL as shown above. Of note it seems to respect the various arguments that you can pass into the end of a YouTube URL so you can start your replay at a specific time or fiddle with the resolution. So if you tag on a “vq=hd1080” for example you get a 1080p stream being captured. Now the really fun thing about this is that it works with various streaming services like Twitch and as such I live captured screenshots while watching the Bethesda event the other night. Something of additional note is that I have found there are some streams that just will not work and or crash VLC… so you may have to shop around for some unofficial locations for trailers if you are doing this after the fact. The Xbox Channel for example seems to be doing something that VLC does not like, and maybe it is the disable embedding flag that you can do through YouTube or something like that.
VLC defaults to using the shortcut of Shift+S for taking a Video Snapshot as they call it. I have ultimately been too lazy to change this to anything else in part because I couldn’t think of a better combination for my purposes. The end result is that I find myself watching streams with the shift key held down permanently and then I tap S anytime I want to take a shot. The default path for saving them is going to be in the Windows User profile Pictures directory. I have modified this and you can do this while you are in the preferences menu as well under the video tab by changing the Video Snapshots directory. You can also change the prefix and the format it will save in. Now you should be ready to easily pull stills from video feeds.
While on the topic of VLC player there is one other somewhat hidden feature that I use the hell out of. We have a number of Chromecasts spread throughout the house and you can use VLC to broadcast a stream to I believe pretty much any of the stream capable devices. These devices only show up in my case when the television is turned on as I am using the USB ports on device to power the chromecasts. However this morning my wife is still in the bedroom and the television is tuned to the news, and as such the Bedroom TV shows up as a possible target under “Renderer”. With this you can use VLC to cast pretty much any media file to a target device giving me one more reason to love this tool.
Tonight I hope to make my way through the Nintendo presentation and tomorrow to write my thoughts about it. I will also likely wrap up anything else that has come out in the pre-E3 buzz and give some of my general thoughts about this year as a whole. In the meantime however I hope this helps you out.
