Month: May 2016

Gracie’s Gaming Rollercoaster

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The last week has been full of highs and lows in my gaming world and I thought I’d share some here. I’ll get the disappointments out of the way early so I can get on to the happy stuff! The big one is of course I did not get into the Legion beta. A friend asked me why I even care since playing the beta means burning out on Legion faster. Long gone are the days where I wanted to play the beta so I could practice leveling and dungeons and make a run for server firsts. Instead, I’d like to see the beta to poke at the new systems, see how the classes have been changed, and just gawk at the new world at a time when WoW is getting really stale.

The other disappointment also comes from the Blizzard front. I got the chance to play Overwatch both during the stress test weekend and the open beta. I was excited, but it turns out that I really do not like competitive shooters and that’s all Overwatch is. Yes, it is polished, beautiful, with a really interesting cast of characters, but if you don’t like shooting squads of strangers with a group of friends or yet more strangers, then this game probably won’t change your mind. The world seems so interesting, though. I’ll add my voice to the chorus that would love to play a PvE shooter in this universe, where I could take time to explore it better.

Enough with the bad, let’s talk about the good stuff! I’ve been playing the Ratchet & Clank reboot game and loving it. It makes me want to dig out my old copy of the original and see all the similarities and differences. I love this series of games so much, and I think part of why I enjoy WildStar as much as I do is because the style and humor very frequently remind me of Ratchet & Clank. Sadly the movie isn’t playing in any of my local theaters, so it looks like I might have to wait for it on Netflix or make a special trip to civilization to see it before it disappears.

My D3 season 6 is moving along nicely. I still need to set aside the time to work on a set dungeon mastery so I can move forward with the journey, and I still haven’t seen any of the new pets or wings drop for me, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with my progress. We’ve reached the point in my circle of friends where the truly hardcore folks have already finished their goals and moved on so it is harder to get carried, but it also means I can set my own pace from here on out. My plan to be slightly more social has also been working well, and I’ve played with quite a few old friends in the past week that I don’t usually get much chance to hang out with anymore.

The big surprise of this week is that I went back to FFXIV for a bit and had the most amazing possible time. I’m not sure exactly when I stopped playing, but the last time I talked about FFXIV much on this blog was during last Blaugust when we were working on the Ravana EX fight. We never did murder that bug before I left, so I’m guessing I’ve been away 7 or 8 months. My triumphant return started out a bit rocky, since I logged in to the bane of MMO nomads everywhere: cluttered bags full of stuff I had no idea what to do with. Once that was taken care of I also had to rebuild my UI and all my macros, which took the better part of an evening.

After all the frustrations of those activities I took a break for a couple days and came back ready to heal butts. I threw myself into duty roulette for some old and some new content and got reminded that I really do still love healing in MMOs, or at least in this specific one. I danced the dances and healed the butts and even occasionally did some DPS too and had a surprisingly good time. My fancy top hat definitely helped improve my mood too. The icing on top was I got to tag along with my Free Company’s pony farm night and won 2 new pony mounts. It’s like the game is trying to bribe me to stick around, and it might just work!


Gracie’s Gaming Rollercoaster

Hype Cycle

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Shiny Baubles

I guess it is time to actually start writing this morning, considering I have stared blankly at the screen for roughly fifteen minutes.  A bunch of storms blew in over night, and I am guessing they woke me up because I feel like I just did not get a single bit of rest last night.  I struggled quite a bit to actually go to sleep, and in the in-between time of laying down and conking out I spent some time browsing the 3DS Nintendo eShop looking for Pokemon Sun and Moon.  I guess somewhere in the whole mix of discussion about the various starters… that I apparently missed that this game is not releasing until November.  The amount of hype floating around twitter yesterday made me think that clearly I had apparently missed the launch date.  However it was just apparently an announcement of the three starters which caused folks to go running and screaming in the aisles.  The amount of pre-hype surrounding games has reached a critical point, and I am just as guilty as anyone.  I pre-bought Warlords of Draenor, Legion, and Overwatch…  because it gave me goodies in game immediately for doing so.  That is ultimately the hook that gets me is when you offer something limited that I potentially won’t be able to get any other way than the pre-order something.

However I feel like today it reached a new level with Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, considering all that has been released is essentially a description of the game and a few screenshots… and it is now 3rd place in the current “top sellers” list on Steam right now.  I mean Bethesda did something similar with Fallout 4, but the pre-orders didn’t start until after the e3 demonstration that gave us a few hours worth of video outlining all of the features going into the game.  It feels like you could hold up a crudely drawn picture of a famous franchise, and money would literally start being thrown at the screen.  Don’t get me wrong… I know that more than likely I too will order Civilization VI because its Civ… and that game makes me lose entire weekends.  However the big takeaway for me is that I have is that I ultimately played way more Civilization IV than I ever did of V.  There are just too many things competing for my attention, and I feel that this is happening to pretty much everyone.

Digging a Hole

I remember a time in PC gaming where you could go several months between the launch of big titles, but now companies seem to revel in stacking similar titles on top of each other at exactly the same time.  I am certain that this information trickle about Civilization VI was to combat and somehow sour the milk of all of those folks thoroughly enjoying Stellaris right now.  It gets frustrating to see this play out,  when everyone is fighting for our very limited amount of attention.  Battleborn is probably a good game, and the little bit of it I have played in the PVE campaign has been enjoyable, and has the same sort of Borderlands style humor liberally sprinkled in.  However its launch has completely been gobbled up by the Overwatch hype machine.  I’ve heard many folks utter the words “oh wait, Battleborn is out now?” or the equivalent because its launch week was completely consumed with the release of Open Beta for Overwatch and the floodgates opening allowing all of the folks who never managed to get an invite into the game.  Now roughly a week after launch, this title that in any other Climate would have drawn huge attention due to it’s pedigree lists below Civilization V in the 16th spot on the current top sellers list on Steam.

It just feels like we are reaching a point where the games industry as a whole is going to eat itself.  What I am seeing is the level of marketing bullshit associated with video games that I last saw prevalent during the big reality television boom of the 2000s.  For all I know a ton of marketing flacks from that era took up roots in the gaming industry because it seemed to provide more stability… which in itself is a stretch given that very few of the folks I know in gaming have been in the same position for more than five years.  What I find frustrating the most is that I say all this… and I still find myself wanting to pre-order this or that title so I can get the shiny bauble or widget that gets discarded about two hours into the game because it is now utterly meaningless and replaced by actual progression loot.  I am very much part of the problem, and I have a disturbing back log of games sitting in various states of minimal play.  Instead I keep logging into Destiny or Diablo or the MMO of choice this month… and spending hour after hour treading the same ground instead of truly giving the new games a chance.  I’ve dug a hole that I will never be able to dig myself out of, because the amount of time needed to finish all of the games in my backlog is more time than I probably have years left to live… given that I have to you know work and stuff.

I don’t have a brilliant conclusion that I can tack onto this discussion like a pretty bow, it is just what happened to flow out of my fingers when I sat down at the keyboard this morning.  The only way things will change is if we stop giving into the pre-sale cycle, but the problem is that the current financing model for games… depends heavily on that early trickle of money.  So this is both “why we can’t have nice things” and “the only way we will have nice things”.  Ultimately it feels like the Video Games industry is being propped up by the same sort of hedge fund shenanigans that lead to the great recession.  There was a time where I thought it would be amazing to work in the Games Industry, but now… I am thankful I chose another path.  I also need to credit Talarian who ultimately planted the seed of this mornings post in my head yesterday, which then I started going over in my head as the night went on.

Fickle Electron

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Curse Your Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal

Fickle Electron

Yesterday was the final day of this brief vacation, and I knew that unlike Monday I needed to actually get some adulting done.  So I scurried around like mad in the morning and knocked a dozen things off of my list all before eating breakfast.  The day was going to be awesome, and to make things even more interesting it turned out that yesterday was “Spindle” day, meaning that the Lost to Light mission was the daily heroic.  Now the Black Spindle weapon in Destiny has been the bane of my existences for some time.  I’ve spent probably a grand total of ten hours working towards getting one now, in the various weeks that it has been available.  Always something goes wrong, and either the group I have managed to assemble doesn’t stand a chance due to low light levels…  or we struggle and get super close to pushing across the line but never quite get it.  On my best attempt we had two mobs left standing at the end of the mission.  The worst part of it is that trying to get folks for this mission is like pulling teeth…  because nobody likes it.  It is that one mission that no one wants to do but everyone feels at least slightly obligated to help with.  So I feel horrible anytime I even begin to ask.

One of the big problems with my clan is that so many of them are only online during what is my “daytime”.  So with me being on vacation I was hoping that would mean that pulling together a crew for it would be easier.  Initially I got pulled into a Challenge of Elders group and then as we were waiting in orbit for someone to take a bathroom break…  there was a power spike.  Instead of the power coming back on…  it flickered a few times and then was off for good.  Sure enough there was a major power outage.  There is a local website where folks post rumors of stuff going on, and it turns out that most of my town was without power or at least most of the shopping district.  This was just too much after the internet outage the other night killing my plans, having a power outage do the same was just frustrating beyond belief.  I reported the outage and the power company was unable to give me any sort of an estimate as to when it might be back on.  I mean I guess it could have been worse… and the outage could have happened at night.  So I went downstairs and fixed myself a sandwich resigned to wait for the power to come back on.

Civil War

Fickle Electron

It was around then that I got an idea and called the local movie theater to ask if they had power.  Sure enough they must have been on one side of whatever the divide was that flicked off the power to the rest of the town.  I had been planning on going to see Captain America: Civil War at some point over the minication so in theory there was no better time than while the power was out.  I normally shun watching movies in 3D but the showing this time was an hour earlier than the non-3D one so I went for it… and resigned myself to wear an awkward pair of glasses over my glasses for the entire film.  Now some theaters have glasses that have actually taken into account that someone might not have perfect vision and wants to watch a movie, but ours has the cheapy disposable RayBan look-a-like glasses.  In any case I sat down to watch the movie without realizing that it was roughly three hours long… and this would ultimately gobble up any time I had left in my day off.  The positive is however that the movie was really good, but I guess the bar is pretty damned high at this point for the movies in the Marvel franchise.  Awhile back I created a playlist in chronological order and it takes over 26 hours to chew your way through it.  This is not taking into account either of the television shows or any other potential direct tie-ins.  This makes this quite possibly the most massive movie series ever created…  and honestly the general high level of quality across all of the movies gives me some huge hope for what Disney will do to the Star Wars franchise.

As far as the movie itself…  how do I talk about it without spoilers.  There are a lot of references to Empire Strikes back during one part of the movie, and I feel like this is apt.  This is very much the Empire Strikes back moment of this series.  It is the first time in the series where there are more unanswered and unsolved problems at the end of the film that were before it started.  Previously each movie was this call to action that was more or less neatly wrapped up by the end credit roll.  Now of course traditionally there are after credits sequences that open up a whole new can of worms and tee up the next film, and this does that nicely.  What it does not do is give the viewer closure.  Things are still pretty screwed up at the end of the movie, and it feels natural that we have another movie waiting in the wings to fill in the rest of the details.  I was honestly afraid that having this movie essentially cut and half and spread between two different years would make it feel like the Harry Potter finale did where it felt like things just were abruptly cleaved in twain.  Instead this feels like a complete movie, but one that we know there will be another complete moving coming behind on its heels to finish things up.  The pacing is much slower as well, which fits the Empire Strikes Back comparison but it happens in a way that adds weight to the movie and not one that makes things feel stretched thin.  In any case it is well worth your time going to see it, but I highly suggest you watch the rest of the series… because this one makes so many references to past movies that I feel like someone might be lost if they started here.  As far as the rest of my plans yesterday…  they more or less didn’t pan out and once again Lost to Light passes without me getting a Black Spindle.

Endless Rockets

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Action Movies

This so far has been one of the stranger breaks from work I have experienced.  Yesterday I was a complete waste of space in all possible versions of that term.  I think I was just overly drained from the weekend and spent most of the day starting things but not quite getting into them.  I played some Rift, patched up Final Fantasy XIV but never actually logged in, played an awful lot of Diablo 3 in very short spurts and occasionally connected to Destiny over remote play to attempt to get exotics from the Ultra Knight on the Dreadnought.  For much of the day though I aimlessly drifted along with whatever happened to be on television.  Namely for whatever reason yesterday was apparently classic action movie day or something, because I caught all of Die Hard and Rambo: First Blood Part II, as well as bits and pieces of others.  The funny thing about action movies is with time they usually seem worse than you remember them… this was absolutely the case with Rambo.  There were so many things in that movie that just seemed silly, from the fact that the helicopter he was piloting at one point seemed to have an endless supply of rockets, to the fact that he fired a ton of bullets and never seemed to stop and change the magazine…  nor did it actually seem to have any place in his outfit to store extra magazines.

Diehard on the other hand, for the most part holds up just as well as I remember it.  In fact in many ways, I appreciate the movie more these days.  The only part I ever really had trouble reconciling was how he ended up without shoes.  I mean I get the point… he was taking the advice to de-stress, but before I went off to be a hero I would have put my shoes on rapidly.  Also the concept of undressing in a strange bathroom is not really something I would ever be comfortable with.  However once the movie starts proper that movie makes a strange amount of sense.  It comes off as more a heist film than a traditional action movie, and we are getting to watch both the heist and the guerrilla resistance to it.  The movie has so many tropes that play out to make it work… from the cokehead hotshot, to the incompetent police chief…  to the equally incompetent federal agents.  I am sorry but Bruce Willis is still a bad ass even when I see him in a modern movie, but he seems to have lost a lot of his early “moonlighting” charm that gets displayed in the original Die Hard.  Sure he makes snarky comments, but I feel like Die Hard really was more a reprisal of the Addison character in a different setting.  The other big takeaway from watching both movies back to back is just how many visuals have been stolen from these films.

Crusaders are Slow
Endless Rockets

Last night was also a mixed bag in that we had been warned for the last several days that a major weather event was coming.  Most certainly it was because it absolutely wreaked havoc on Wynnewood area, but for the most part in the Tulsa area we got nothing but spotty rain.  That did not stop us however from going into storm mode where we both hung out downstairs watching the constant scroll of weather reports and storm chasers across our screen.  As a result I didn’t do the normal Destiny thing because it didn’t really feel safe to be upstairs and oblivious to what was happening.  Instead I played quite a bit more Diablo 3, and eventually took to helping my friend Thalen level.  Later we were joined by Grace and the pace of leveling increased greatly.  As my crusader I can take a lot of damage, but I just dish it out ever so slowly.  The unfortunately part about my seasonal journey is that I am now to the point where I need to do some sort of a conquest to move on to the next step, and none of them look really doable for a crusader.  I mean the “easiest” and most grindy one is to level three gems to 65, and at this point I am working on that every so slowly.  I have all three of my normal gems to over 45 and am ever so slowly working my way to 65.

However to get that bank tab I am going to need another conquest somewhere.  We made a quick attempt at the kill 350 in a cursed chest and came up very short with our group getting 292 which normally would feel awesome…  but still very short of the goal.  I have a couple of friends playing Demon Hunters and in theory they can solo it, so I might pester them for assistance.  The chest in question that supposedly is the easiest to do is one that spawns in the Paths of the Drowned in Act V, and spawns a ton of bogglings.  The problem being for me to kill things as a crusader I need to get them super close to me… and trying to wrangle all of the mobs is the big challenge.  I really either need an disintegration wizard or a rapid fire demon hunter that can wreck things as fast as they spawn to get through it.  The only problem here is that I am definitely behind the curve when it comes to this season and both demon hunters already have their extra bank tab and are now playing significantly less.  My fear is that this is going to be the equivalent of the Black Spindle in Destiny… aka that thing I try a bunch of times but can never seem to do.  As far as today goes…  I am not sure what is on the radar.  I know I need to adult like mad, and do the laundry.  I am also hoping to sneak off to go see Civil War, largely because I know some of my co-workers will be wanting to talk about it upon my return.  As far as gaming goes, that is entirely up in the air and more than likely I will just end up playing a lot more Diablo 3.