For a good number of us this is “return to work day” and I am hoping it is finding you well.  Our holiday was a bit odd because my wife and I were realistically too sick to go to any of the family festivities.  As such we begged off on a few of the traditions until next weekend.  I used to take all of the time off between Christmas Eve and the day after New Years, but I was late getting my request in.  As such I am going to be stuck being the sole manager at work, and in truth the only voice of authority on my side of the house…  which will be interesting.  I did however take off all of next week to make up for it…  so I just need to get through the next few days.  This partial week is more or less going to be one of retrospection on the blog as I start doing the various year end activities.  This morning however I am going to talk about the various gaming related things I did over the weekend, starting with the Starlight Celebration in FFXIV…  which was adorable as usual but not really worth talking much about otherwise.

Next up there is a holiday event running in Magic the Gathering Arena where you can play Pauper for free for a handful of prizes.  I threw together some black and green jank and immediately lost the first round, so I thought this would be a short lived event for me.  My hope was to win a single round so I could get the full art Llanowar Elves.  Instead however I went five wins after that initial loss and wound up winning a Firemind’s Research…  which is in Izzet colors and not exactly the sort of thing I play but hey…  free card and closing out the event by winning.  I need to play a few more rounds so I can stack up three more of the Llanowar Elves, but when I say it is a bunch of jank I mean it.  There is literally no discernible theme in this deck other than a bunch of cards that I for one reason or another like.

Another thing that I did over the break was farm up a full set of the Universal Studios of Japan gear, which was available for PC players.  On the console you had to do a bunch of nonsense to get someone who had actually visited the theme park to start the queue for you.  On the PC however we could just join straight away so I got a cool set of reskinned High Rank Rathalos gear and a Rank 7 water based longsword.  Mostly these are things for the collection and while I will use Rathalos parts for mixed sets, it is going to be super rare that I actually break that sword out.

Another thing that happened is I played through Return of the Obra Dinn from start to finish in a single sitting.  Well technically not a single sitting as I took some bathroom breaks there, but more or less played for six hours start until I beat it that night.  For the uninitiated this is a game that is attempting to feel old school… but doing a bunch of things that those elder games never could have accomplished.  The elevator pitch is that the Obra Dinn disappeared on the high seas in 1802 and mysteriously arrived in port in 1807.  You are dispatched as an insurance adjuster for the London Office of the East India Company and armed with a special pocket watch that allows you to view the last moments of a specific individuals death.  This more or less is a logic puzzle as you need to sort out the names and fates of all fifty-ish passengers, but what hooked me was the story being told through snippets… because quite frankly I wanted to learn more and just kept pushing forward.  Well worth the play through and is now going on my list for the Games of the Year AggroChat show.

Finally I spent a ridiculous amount of time building in Minecraft because it was relaxing.  Ultimately I was watching something on History channel about ancient ruins, which prompted me to want to build in Minecraft.  That is generally how my Minecraft sessions go… I will get the urge to build something and then off I go into a project for awhile.  I am not entirely certain how this building came out the way it did…  but I started off wanting to build a giant pyramid and then decided to shift goals halfway through.  Each time I started building it sort of took a different direction and since I snapped this screenshot I have added more stuff onto it.  I did it in creative mode since I wasn’t really in the mood to mine tons of materials before I could start this sort of a project.  There are times when I will start something legit and other times like this one where I just wanted to build a thing that I had in my head.  Right now I am getting a strong urge to demolish the staircase and rebuild it as something with landings every so often.

Regardless that was my holiday break in a nutshell.  We also recorded a show along the way at some point which I have linked above.  I hope you had the best of holidays and that you don’t have to go back today.  However if you do…  our tears will keep us moisturized as we return to the salt mines.  Let me know how your holiday break went, and what cool things you did along the way!

This morning I feel like I should be writing something terribly profound given that this is my last post before Christmas.  Unfortunately I am not feeling profound.  We went to a Holiday party last weekend and my wife seems to have picked up some crud, which has progressed throughout the week.  Over the the last two days it feels like I too am coming down with whatever it is.  Fortunately today I only work a half day and then am off for four days.  I used to do this thing where I would essentially take off from before Christmas all the way through to after New Years but unfortunately…  given the position I am in  the other two section managers got their requests in before me.  So as such I am back to work on Wednesday and then off again the first week of the year, which should be fine.  I honestly don’t mind so much given that Christmas is largely about the kids and the other two managers have them… and I do not.  Like my cats won’t actually notice that a holiday is happening and will instead just look at me strangely when I am home during the day on a non-weekend.

Because I used to have almost two weeks off at Christmas I would do all sorts of things with that amount of time.  One year for example I played through Mass Effect 3…  and then played through Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 all over again in sequence to see how the decisions effected each other.  Another Christmas I leveled in duo the entire time in Star Wars the Old Republic.  This time however I don’t feel like I have anywhere near as much time as I would have liked so I am going to have to temper those expectations.  Some of the things I would like to accomplish over the break.

• Dad of War
  • I would love to actually make more progress in this game and better yet would love to beat it so that I could decide if it is in fact on my games of the year list or not.
• Monster Hunter World
  • both the USJ and Behemoth events are live on PC and I want to farm gear from both of those.
• Destiny 2
  • I would like to ignite the last few forges that I am missing.
• FFXIV
  • I want to do the holiday event and collect the items that come from it.
  • I would also love to get unstuck gear wise and learn to farm dungeons as a tank again.
  • I would really love to figure out the glamour chest system and clean out my banks.
• Elder Scrolls Online
  • I just want to figure out why the hell my patcher is no longer working and get back in game.

Now that is a lot of things to try and cram into four days, given that we also have holiday festivities involved as well.  However it is worth a shot.  We unfortunately still have a bunch of shopping to do because we are bad at thinking of things to get for people during the run up to the holidays and wind up frantic at the last moment.  It is going to be a rather un-fun holiday if my wife stays sick and I continue to get sicker.  However that does not preclude me from wishing all of you out there a very Happy Holiday.  I will likely be hanging out in various online games since that tends to be what I do on breaks, so if you see me around say hi and I will wish you a proper greeting in real time as well.  I hope everyone has a great break and some good times with whoever you choose to call your family be they related or just an assemblage of the people that matter to you in life.  Next week I will start doing my rundown posts to cap the year, but in the meantime…  enjoy yourselves and I will likely see you again on Wednesday unless the spirit hits me.

Holiday Checklist – I have a shortened break but here are a few of the things I would like to accomplish.

Yesterday I mentioned that I thought I had a blog post in me about games testing and NDAs, and this morning we are going to see if that is true.  For those who are uninitiated the NDA stands for a Non-Disclosure agreement, and if you have reached this step in life without having already signed one count yourself lucky.  As a software developer by trade, pretty much every job has required one from me so I was more than familiar with them when I also started signing them for games tests.  Since I am talking about material that cannot effectively be spoken about… I decided to mock up the experience of playing something heavily governed with the above image filled with watermarks.  Currently I am engaged in three separate alpha tests and it seems as though the winds have changed.  For awhile it was en vogue to do all of your testing as a public alpha that allowed those who were in to effectively act as free advertising for the game drumming up hype along the way.

The problem with that however is that I am not entirely certain it ever worked as intended.  YouTube has basically made a cottage industry of mocking games that are not quite ready for prime time, which in truth should be any alpha or beta test.  Originally those were times for the game to find itself and having a limited testing group helped to prune things that were not working and hone in and polish the things that were.  However within the last decade these shifted from being a development mechanism to taking on a bunch of different purposes.  You had some games where the alpha or beta served as an extended demo period… take for example Fallout 76 that went into “beta” on October 23rd and the final game “shipped” on November 14th.  Having been around software development for going on three decades now…  there are no meaningful changes that can be made in such a short period of time.

Another case that has sprung up are the games that began selling access to testing in the form of “early access” or “founders packs”, which amount to you helping to fund the development of the game and in theory helping to shape the features as they are being put into the game.  I’ve purchased a number of paid alphas over the years, because in some cases especially with Indie games it gives you the opportunity to lock the game in at a bargain price.  After all when I bought into Minecraft it was less than $10 and that certainly was an investment that paid off over time.  However all too often games languish in early access more as a means of getting their shit together and keeping websites from publishing “official reviews” of the title since they can keep claiming that it is still in beta.  Rust for example went into early access in December of 2013 and finally launched in February or 2018…  which maybe seems like an excessive amount of time in testing.  The other problem with early access is you are effectively squandering whatever hype you might have had upon launching the game…  because effectively in the eyes of your players you launched a buggy game when you opened initial access.

The biggest problem with public testing is that while it allows you to develop a bit of a grass roots community on platforms like YouTube or Twitch… it also means that at any moment you could be subject to the same sort of blooper reels that effectively killed Mass Effect Andromeda.  Within days of that game launching a number of the issues were cleared up and I found it to be an amazingly fun experience.  However once the glitch videos started circulating it not only killed the game… but effectively killed the franchise.  Opening your game to the world is effectively playing with fire and once you get to a certain level of hype there are going to be folks all too willing to shit on your game to make a buck and rake in the views.

So effectively what I am seeing as a result is that more games are going underground and slapping an NDA on so that they can safely get on with the business of testing.  I was one of the very early tests of Elder Scrolls Online, starting with the very first external test in February of 2013 and continuing right up until the April 2014 launch date.  During that time I watched that game change significantly sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse but it was legitimately a testing process where we provided feedback and the developers reacted to it.  That is how testing should be and started out with limited engagement testing every few weeks and then eventually worked up to being on for longer periods of time.  

I’ve been in extremely bizarre alpha tests as well.  One company required me to effectively fill out a contract that included the NDA as part of that, and not only sign a digital agreement but to print out a document and get it witnessed and notarized.  In addition to that I had to send in a photocopy of my drivers license.  I’ve had others where the game was technically restricted but I never actually wound up agreeing to anything and had a key just show up in my mail box with no mention of the NDA in the letter.  I personally tend to take the NDA pretty seriously, and in twenty years of testing maintained a firewall that keeps information about said games out of the things I am willing to talk about publicly.  I am only really comfortable talking about this in general right now because I am in three separate testing processes and there is no real way of you guessing which games that might be.

Sure it sucks that I can’t talk about the things that I am really enjoying, because there are things I could hype about each of them.  There are also things that I would complain about each of them, and that NDA is effectively buying the company time to fix or at least mitigate those problems.  I for one am happy to see closed testing returning to seemingly being the norm, because after years of public testing I am not sure the hype generated ever was worth the issues that arose from it.  There will always be people willing to break NDA like the individual who streamed Anthem and got some reportedly major circumstances for doing so…  but then later was confirmed to not actually have any games on their Origin profile to start with.  The thing is though… breaking an NDA is against the terms of service of most digital distribution platforms and in theory you could lose whatever account you used to cause the break on.  It would never be worth me risking my Steam account for example, just in the hopes of getting a few more eyeballs to find this blog or my neglected twitch stream.

To wrap this up… I am very much in favor of games testing starting to go dark again.  That said my job is also not tied to talking about games.  This is a thing I do for fun and as a hobby, and I have gone out of my way to not actually make any money from this blog in spite of the regular stream of folks who want to advertise on it.  Were this my daytime gig I might feel completely different, because then I would be grasping at things to fill the current 24 hour a day gaming news cycle.  Everyone loves seeing a sneak peek at games, and when you have alpha access and can take some really cool screenshots or videos to embellish your prose, it makes for a compelling user experience.

This is just my take, but I am absolutely open to other ideas. Are you in favor of games testing going dark or would you prefer that testing remain open and public?