Regularly Playing: January 2019 Edition

January 18, 2019 by Belghast

I took the day off to deal with some stuff around the house and hopefully catch some of the opening festivities of Pax South. Unfortunately the timing did not work again this year and I will be missing the show. I have to admit I am more than a little bummed about that, and I figured hanging out and watching the twitch streams was honestly the closest I could get to attending. In many ways the stream watchers get a better view of some of the show than the folks that are there… given that I quite honestly found it a challenge to hit all of the presentations that I wanted to. Ashgar is there and I am hoping he has a blast and comes back to the podcast with all sorts of cool things to talk about. In the meantime however I thought I would use the opportunity of not having a time scheduled associated with my morning post… to do some administrative work and push out a Regularly Playing post given that they tend to take significantly longer than the usual morning fare.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 – PC

While I have been spending a lot of time playing single player games right now… I am still very much engaged with Destiny 2 and popping in every few nights to do stuff. Yesterday they released a “This Week at Bungie” post or TWAB as the community calls it this time penned by Luke Smith who is now donning the title of Franchise Director. In it he goes through a bunch of tweaks and some of the things that they are working on… and I personally think we have some good times ahead of us. There is some discussion of catch up mechanics… and quite honestly that is the weakest part of Destiny. The onboarding process for new players is atrocious if you were not playing from day one and somehow remained relevant. I am on board with this game and while my time is pretty split right now I am still keeping one food in so I can experience the cool stuff.

Dragalia Lost – Android

I am shocked as hell that I am still engaged in Dragalia Lost given my previous history of bouncing pretty fast from mobile games… especially those with Gacha mechanics. This is essentially my wind down every night before going to bed… I play through the five things that make up the dailies and then anything else that happens to suit my fancy that evening. I think what keeps me engaged is the fact that there is either always an event going on or one just about to start… so the release cadence is such that it always keeps me poking my head back in to get whatever happens to be the new stuff. The accumulation of whatever the hell the rainbow currency is called is fast enough that I can pretty reliably get one 10 times summon every single week, which also keeps me interested in spite of quite regularly getting nothing of use. For whatever reason this game seems to be the perfect blend of action-ish combat, raid bosses and interesting backstories for the characters.

Monster Hunter World – PC

While I am playing significantly less of Monster Hunter World… I am still very much engaged and have been in one form or another since launch. This past year has more than anything been the tale of my changing tastes in how I want to interact with a game. MHW and Destiny 2 both have a sort of drop in and get to playing quickly style that I find greatly appealing right now. Whereas there are other games I will talk about on this list that I am struggling to stay interested in. I played an awful lot during the Universal Studios of Japan event, and will likely engage shortly during the release anniversary event when all of the things that they have put into the game to date are available once more. The only part that I am a little bummed about is how they have yet to catch the PC version up to the Console… and because of that it feels like a second class citizen. I am really concerned that Icebourne may not release at the same time for PC and Console… because at this very moment I am deeply committed to the PC release and have not touched the console since August.

Pokemon Go – Android

PoGo stays on the list but honestly it is sort of holding on by a thread. I am still engaged because my TicWatch and the integration of Pokemon Go with android wear devices means that I can capture movement without the application up. As such I am spending a lot of time hatching eggs and not a lot of time actively catching Pokemon. I will go in spurts with this one, where I play religiously for a week… and then do not touch it at all other than clicking on the egg hatching notifications. Shocked however that I have maintained at least a passing interesting in the game since release.

Elder Scrolls Online – PC

This game is one of those games that I keep poking my head back into every few weeks, but not really gaining traction. I think more than anything I am struggling to engage with the MMORPG style of gameplay. In theory I should just start Summerset and be done with it, as that will keep me engaged for awhile because what I have seen thusfar looks pretty great. I am also really interested in the Elsweyr expansion that they just announced. I should really pop in and spend some time on my Warden or quite frankly ANY of the other alts that I have rolled… because since launch I have been almost 100% devoted to the Dragon Knight main.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

This is another game that is just barely holding on by a thread. I am pretty much logging in every week when we do the podcast to collect my Cactpot winnings… and not logging in any other time. The Blue Mage just went in and I should do that… but there are a few things that are stopping me from engaging. The anxiety over starting tanking again… mixed with the frustration of the queues for DPS… give me a lack of things that I feel like I can realistically do in game. Probably more importantly…. my inventory is nonsense and I need to spend time dumping things into the glamour vault but I have not wanted to do the gaming equivalent of filing my tax returns. I hate inventory management… and if there was a button that would just dump everything that was not relevant to any of my classes into the glamour bin… I would absolutely have pushed that awhile ago. I deal with paperwork at work constantly… and I have not wanted to do that in the gaming world so I keep running away from the game. Stays on the list however since I keep popping back in for short periods of time.

To The Returning and Brand New

Ashen – PC

I’ve not really talked much about this on the blog, but Ashen is a game I started playing over the break that currently is only available Xbox One via the Game Pass or on the Epic Games store on PC. On some level it reminds me of what you would get if Dark Souls and Breath of the Wild had a love child… but somehow wound up without a face. That is quite frankly the most disturbing part about the art style is the fact that NO ONE HAS A FACE. You roam around with a companion that is assigned to you based on what quest you happen to be doing… or have the option to play with another person. The game escalates rather quickly and I have been roaming around an area… where the first and second boss of the game just straight up become normal mobs that you have to face ALL THE FREAKING TIME. I like it though… but I can’t exactly explain why I like it.

Far Cry 5 – PC

If you’ve read my blog over the last couple of weeks you will know without a doubt that I have been playing this game. While I have technically beaten it… there is a new game plus option as well as a ton of DLC content so I am keeping it on the list. I enjoyed aspects of it greatly and other parts… frustrated the shit out of me. However I have said plenty in recent memory so just leaving it at that.

Assassin’s Creed – PC

Similarly I have been playing a not insignificant amount of Assassin’s Creed, but again you have heard a lot of that talk on this blog in the last few days and are probably going to hear a lot more in the future. I am enjoying the game a lot and expect to see more of it in the coming weeks. It’s a good game brent.

Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

I got into the alpha of this game pretty early all things considered and have been engaged since that point… and as a result I am shocked that today is the first time it is making the sidebar. I love Magic the Gathering and always have since high school when I really got deeply engaged with the release of Revised edition. Sadly it was not something on my radar until then, so I don’t have that many high dollar cards apart from a SUPER beat up Time Vault and Library of Alexandria… and of course a big stack of dual lands. I’ve flirted with pretty much every digital card game that has come down the pipe over the last few years… and all of them were lacking in some way. Arena is the game I was looking for, because it is actual Magic the Gathering… and not Elder Scrolls MTG or Warcraft MTG. I am happy as a clam and have been playing this at least once a week since I first got my hands on it. I find the mechanism for gaining cards to be enjoyable and the prices for purchasing packs to be not too terrible. I also dig the way they are starting to put codes into some of the constructed physical products that give you all of those cards in MTG Arena.

Minecraft – Windows Store

I’ve been oddly back playing a lot of Minecraft lately because I find the freeform building aspect to be extremely relaxing. Also shockingly it has apparently never made my side bar? I am not exactly sure what I can say about the game that has not already been said by a bunch of people. I will say however that since playing on the Windows Store version that I consider infinitely superior to the java client (apart from the lack of modding) I have been having a bit of a renaissance. If only they could take the freeform modding functionality of Java and shim it into the far better running Windows client… the would would be a better place.

To Those Departing

Fallout 76 – PC

I am not exactly sure what happened here… other than the fact that it was a timing thing. The game did not grab me in the way I thought it would. I fully expect to explore it once again when private server options are available, but I missed the boat on getting engaged with the group that was playing it among the AggroChat members… in part because of time zones. I don’t think it is the horrible game that so many other people seem to think it is… I just found myself lacking in drive to really do things. I have to admit… a lot of my frustration with the game was the constant drive to find food and water because I generally don’t like that level of survival in my games. When I can roll a custom server that turns off hunger and thirst… I will probably love exploring.

Diablo 3 – PC/Switch

I am sure it will come back, but for now I am not really playing it. The fact that the new season is upon us tonight, and Grace does not have a functional computer right now also greatly harms my desire to play it. We largely did seasons as a team, and I can’t really see myself going through the grind without a partner. I might poke my head in and work through it slowly at some point… but for now I am not really expecting to play much given the other games on my plate.

Hellgate London – Steam

The Steam release is not exactly a great game, and has some fairly significant performance issues that have not really been addressed by Hanbitsoft. As such I am not playing it, and if I do again… it will be me installing all of the unofficial patches and trying out the emulator server community. For now however this game has gone to bed. I don’t regret picking up the steam version, because it gave me a week or so of joy.

Pokemon Let’s Go – Switch

I am sure I will return to this at some point, but for now I am just not playing it. One of the things that harmed my enjoyment was the fact that I could not use my pro controller at all. I keep hoping that they give me the ability to play with the pro controller in the same manner as I do in handheld mode. However given Nintendo’s desire to make us deal constantly with fiddly bullshit… I doubt that is going to happen. I am constantly asking myself… why the fuck can’t Nintendo just make normal games. I’ve never enjoyed motion controls and probably never will.

To Those I Flirted With

This is a new feature to add to this semi-monthly list… the games that I poked my head into but am not sure if they are for me yet.

Breach – PC

I am not sure if I am on board for this or not, but I did pick up the cheapest starter pack so I would have a fair number of classes that I owned to play now that it has entered Steam Early access. I am intrigued… but not entirely sure how much I will be playing. It is well worth a look however because like I said the other day… it is a bizarre love child of The Secret World, Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm.

New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe – Switch

I’ve been playing a bit of this but not really enough to properly add it to the list yet. The switch version performs extremely well and the switch feels like a better controller option than the WiiU did. I’ve just gotten started playing but I expect to be poking my head in off and on throughout the month. I still think this has one of the worst names … because Nintendo also cannot name things properly.

Friends through Food

January 17, 2019 by Belghast

I know I have talked briefly about this in the past, but we have been adopted by two of the neighborhood cats. First we had the cat that we refer to as “big boy” who comes running from several yards away when he sees us come out in the morning. He does this thing where he rears back on his hind paws to reach up and headbutt our hands and it is adorable. He wants food of course but I think he mostly wants attention, and I take a break from the coffee and blogging time to go give it to him when my wife shouts up that he is out there. He isn’t out every single day… but comes close to it and we know which house he belongs at and they have a doggie door so he is sorta on free roam as he likes. He apparently visits lots of houses during the day and ours is but one stop on his trip.

Over time we developed a second cat… that admittedly we refer to as “Two” because we are unoriginal and also have no clue where she belongs. This cat seems way more “permanently struggling” than big boy, and over time our relationship with her has improved. At the beginning she would run the second we got near the door… only returning once she was sure we were no longer around. Each day she would run away a little less… to this morning when she did not budge at all when we opened the door and only eased away as I walked out on the porch to set down some piles of food. I set out two piles since I know that her and big boy have a sort of uneasy truce… but cannot be expected to eat from the same pile.

From what I can tell she lives somewhere behind our house, as often times in the morning I will come into the kitchen and our backyard light has tripped. We have it on a motion sensor and I have looked out a few times and seen her back there and even when I have not… often times she shows up in the front of the house as soon as we turn the porch light on. We’ve built a little box full of blankets on the front porch in hopes of enticing her to snuggle in since it has been fairly cold of late… but so far no luck there. We’ve seen her hanging out on the porch and using it as a windbreak… but no actual snuggling.

I am sure however that at some point in the next few weeks/months we will reach a point where she is comfortable enough around us to stay while we feed… or even let us pet her. She has been super skittish but each day feels like a tiny victory as she becomes less so. I mean it is not like we need more cats… given that we have three indoor ones, but we are suckers for animals that look like they need taking care of. So as a result we now have our indoor family and our outdoor family… and someday maybe an amalgam of the two. For the time being however I am just trying to teach “Two” that we are pretty okay human beings that are setting this food out just for her.

On the gaming front, I am still engaged with Assassin’s Creed Origins, even though I had a bit of a fragmented night for reasons. I didn’t get out of work until almost 6 pm which put me getting home way later than normal… then I fixed dinner for myself and fixed dinner again for my wife when she got home around 8:30 pm. So as a result I got a bunch of little things accomplished in the game, but didn’t move the story forward much past opening up the next sequence of targets. I somehow doubt that those are actually the FINAL list of Targets however… because I figure there will be a final batch after those that represent the end game. These targets mostly seem like they serve a way to open up new areas of the game like Giza and Memphis for example. Still having a blast, especially in the weird amalgam of Egyptian and Greek culture that are sort of mashing together.

One thing the game does a good job of is what Pete mentioned yesterday in the comments… of showing just how insanely long the Egypt was a major world player. The period of Egyptian dominance that we think of in the history books started in roughly 3150 BC and concluded somewhere around 332 BC… which is 2818 years… so yeah no wonder we are exploring ancient ruins in a game that appears to be set towards the end of the Ptolemaic period of Egypt when it is effectively ruled by the Greeks. There are so many interesting themes going on in this game that I just sorta want to wallow in the world instead of pushing the story forward. I’ve helped out so many random people just as a diversion from moving the needle forward. The moment to moment gameplay feels really good and as such I am super happy to be out exploring new areas.

Last night I had to sneak my way up to the Lighthouse of Alexandria… because I assumed there would be a leap of faith… however it was a bit shorter than I was expecting. I halfway expected to have one that would take me down the entire length of the tower, but instead it just deposited me at a hay pile a few stories down. Maybe there is another post that I somehow missed on the climb up that would provide a more gratifying experience. All in all I am still very much enjoying myself and look forward to playing it over the upcoming four day weekend.

Exploring Alexandria

January 16, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I am talking about Assassin’s Creed and there might be minor spoilers here and there. Be warned.

We’ve talked about this a bit in the past, of how in general Assassin’s Creed has not been my jam. I tried playing the fourth game in the series on Playstation 4 and the second game on PC, and while I definitely enjoyed parts of it… there were always missions that frustrated me… specifically the ones that involved racing awkwardly along the tops of buildings. Assassin’s Creed Origins however I largely picked up on a whim because it looked so damned cool… and I caught it on a holiday sale a year ago. I’ve always been a huge fan of Egypt mythology and I thought it would be cool to see what the world might have looked like at that time. I know next to nothing about the Templar versus Assassin’s thing… other than apparently the Templar are bad guys… which makes me a bit sad given my supposed Templar lineage. Assassin’s being the good guys is also a bit hard to wrap my head around given that they are generally bad… but I guess if you mostly kill evil doers you are okay. I on the other hand have a proclivity for killing everything with a red bar and dumping the body in the bushes… but that might just show deep character flaws in myself.

First off the game is freaking gorgeous… and of note I have been playing it exclusively through Parsec streaming off my upstairs gaming rig. Because of that I am choosing to play at 1080p Ultra settings instead of 4k as I probably would sitting at the console upstairs, because pushing a 4k image and having it downsampled to the 1080p client causes some weirdness. I know that it must be causing a lot more bandwidth because I end up with stutters on games that never have stutters on 1080p. Additionally I am streaming to a laptop… and quite frankly the best it can produce is a 1080p image so there isn’t much point at all of overtaxing the machine upstairs. All of those caveats aside it has been flawless, and playing in this manner has pretty much become my daily routine. Granted I did go through some nonsense steps to make my connection more stable, so you have to take that into account as far as how smoothly my personal experience with Parsec has gone.

I spent my evening running through quests in both Yamu and Alexandria… and I have to say Alexandria specifically is impressive as hell. It might be one of the cooler cities I have experienced in a game like this… in part because it feels accurate. I am not entirely certain how accurate it actually is, but there is a truth to the layout that transports you back to what it must have been like to live in that area at this time. I also never really thought about how deeply mingled the Greek and Egyptian cultures must have been at that time, and the game really underlines that point. It actually makes me really interested in continuing this journey into Odyssey, since it effectively moves the story more into the main sphere of Greek influence. I think more than anything that was what interested me in this game was because it was placed in a setting that I wanted to feel like I was experiencing. Sure London or Paris or whatever other locations these games have taken place in are cool… but I have been curious about all of these places the generated the Mythologies that I loved growing up and games like this are finally allowing me to explore them.

I think more than anything the free roaming nature of the game and the ability to keep collecting interesting weapons… outfits… and mounts is going to keep me glued to it for awhile. It really does feel like I am playing a single player MMORPG in some aspects… but the world feels alive in spite of not actually having other players in it. I think that is maybe something that these games have gotten better at doing, either that or I find myself craving being around other people significantly less than I used to. I would always bounce from single player titles because they somehow felt “dead” and that I kept craving the intangible characteristic that playing a game constantly surrounded by others brought to the experience. That said… right now I am having trouble sinking my teeth into MMORPGs at all… so maybe that is accounting for my wanting to delve deeper into these games than I ever really did in the past. The only negative is this does nothing to help out that New Years resolution of being more engaged socially in gaming… but for the moment it is bringing me joy and I am just going to roll with it.

I think you can pretty much consider me hooked at this point… and much like with Far Cry 5… I am going to see this out to the end. That said I think the end is going to be way less cut and dried with this experience as the path seems like it is going to be considerably longer. Last night I just completed the initial main story quest of the game, and it is clear that I am now entering a much larger world with complex interweaving story-lines. In fact the game just gave me an achievement to underline this point called “I’m Just Getting Started”. It has been awhile since I have played anything that I craved getting home to play some more of… and Far Cry 5 and Assassin’s Creed Origins have both given me that feeling. While I wish I could re-engage with Final Fantasy XIV, I am just going to go with this feeling while it lasts.

Far Cry 5 Done

January 15, 2019 by Belghast

I still appear to be having screenshot issues. Likely a reboot will take care of it, but right now thing seems to be saving an image in games… so as a result you are going to get some recycled images with this mornings post. Last night I finished Far Cry 5… and I have words about it. The game as a whole is still something I consider to be really awesome. The story and the forced nature of it however is not awesome. After playing through it… I have this feeling that whoever designed the narrative wanted it to be some shocking and moving work of art that would make us feel something. However it is hard to actually feel things about an interactive narrative that you have no control over. This is a game that told me a story, and made my character do things that I would not have done… and the payoff is more shit happening that I was not invested in. The shocking reveal didn’t feel that shocking when the game kept forcibly pushing our noses in it as we played along.

I think this is the challenge with telling a traditional story… in an open world game. The open world nature means that the majority of the time we have complete freedom over our actions and can do whatever the hell suits us. However when the narrative path is one that would better suit an on rails corridor shooter… there is a cognitive disconnect between the freedom you normally experience and the super linear nature of the cutscenes. By contrast if you take something like a Skyrim or a Fallout… you arrive at a conclusion that was driven by your actions and your interactions in the freeroam world and as a result even if that conclusion isn’t exactly what you expected it still feels like yours. For a game that has put so much emphasis on building big open world games… you would think that by now they were a bit better at telling stories in them.

I am still curious to see what happens in Far Cry New Dawn… but I have also lowered my expectations significantly.

There was more game to be played in Far Cry 5 with the DLC… but quite honestly I needed a break from that world for a bit. Originally it was my intend to pop into God of War, but I was too lazy to go upstairs and figure out why PS4 Remote Play was not working. As a result instead I poked my head into Assassin’s Creed… which admittedly is yet another Ubisoft open world game. This one feels considerably different however, and I never actually left Siwa in my initial playing of it. I have this problem when a game gives me a big open world to explore… yet tells me that I should leave it to move on with the story. I want to go out and explore everything, and as a result I spent way the hell too long roaming around the desert tracking down question mark icons on the horizon. I had this same problem with Dragon Age Inquisition and the Hinterlands.

Last night I moved the story ahead a bit and probably will be playing this for the next few nights to see if I can get re-engaged. I like the gameplay a lot, which is shocking considering that I never really clicked with Assassin’s Creed before this game. However considering the number of series Stalwarts that didn’t really like this title… I am guessing maybe there is a reason? This feels more like an action combat MMO-lite sort of feel, and I am largely on board with that. The bow gameplay could be better, but it is passable and serves its purpose. I know I have a ton of game play ahead of me as I have only managed to track down two of the targets I am after. I am sorta feeling like when I kill those targets… it is going to give me a world two sort of thing and I realize that my revenge plot is only the beginning.