Good Chorfun

Good Morning Friends! I am slowly trying to get back into the swing of things. My last day of work for the year was 12/17 and as a result I am good and toast when it comes to actually getting up at normal times. Normal for me being 5:30 in the morning, but I am struggling forward regardless and trying to make a blog post happen. Apologies for the extremely sporadic nature of my posts over the last few weeks but I was very much “in vacation mode”. The truth is you didn’t miss an awful lot and I have fallen back into a single player gaming binge. For the last few weeks I have been getting up around 8 am when the synergy of my bladder and the cats wanting food coalesced into forcing me out of the bed. Now we are returning to being governed by an alarm and so far… the progress is mixed.
Thanks to watching my way through the second season of Witcher over the break, I have found myself returning to playing Witcher 3. This will be my second full play through of the game and it is just as good as I remember it being. There is something about the end of one year and the beginning of a new one… that seemingly drives me to wanting to play a big meaty open world single player adventure. The weirdest part about this most recent turtle is that it isn’t really due to me being stressed and needing a break from humanity. If anything I have the latent desire to be around other people, but my brain just wants to be playing these sort of games instead of diving back into the Endwalker alt leveling and gear grinding process.
It started initially as a good intentioned “lets have a break to let other people play this extremely congested game”, and has more or less turned into an obsession with completing all of the things in Velen and Novigrad. I love this world and setting and I love being my kind-hearted version of Geralt. Someone really in need and shouldn’t be spending coin in my services? Well if given the chance I will take the “you keep the coin” option. I will say that the game actively fights against you trying to turn Geralt into a questing knight however, because often times things don’t go down as you might hope. I’ve found a number of quests this time around that I somehow missed last time and me trying my best to save the say… has not necessarily been good enough. Then there are the comedy relief quests like the Trolls… and I love Witcher Trolls. It was also only on this playing… that I finally grasped what “Chorfun” meant.
The thing that I have been struggling with is that initially I had decided to give Yennifer a try this time around. However… I just can’t do it. Triss is just better in every possible way and I kinda hate that Yennifer is so hardly pushed as the “lore correct” answer. Yen is just not a good match for my kinder gentler soft-hearted version of Geralt. Yen makes sense if you are leaning into the whole “two hopelessly fucked up people who deserve each other” aspect of The Witcher universe, but just feels wrong to me personally. That said if you are a Yen stan I won’t get in your way… but I have a feeling I am going to keep choosing Miss Merigold over and over each time I play through.
All of this said… I have picked back up the novels and started up again where I left off with Blood of Elves. This time last year I read through the first two books… which are largely a collection of short stories. By the time I got to Blood of the Elves, it was just dense enough to make me bounce after reading the two much more casual reads in a row. For the last several nights I have been reading for about an hour on my phone and while I read terribly slowly… especially when my wife keeps trying to talk to me while reading… however I am about halfway through at this point. My wife and I have completely different “going to sleep routines”. For her it is like she needs to get all of her talking out of her system before she can sleep… but for me I need silence to wind down and the more she talks… the more I wake back up. Generally speaking through reading something is one of the better ways for me to drift off to slumber and reading the book on my phone gives me these perfectly bite sized chunks of the book formatted to fit the small screen. Well this is a blog post down… and I am still awake so here is hoping I can get back into the swing of actually waking up on time and knocking out a post each morning. I had a great break and I hope you all did as well. The post Good Chorfun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Games Played 2021 Edition

The Grand Experiment – Tracking Games Played since 2012
Well friends it is that time once again to do my “Games Played” post for the year. Each year this image becomes significantly less readable as I am slowly expanding the width of what is shown in frame. For those who are completely new to the blog or might not have experienced one of these posts before I have a strange obsession. Back in 2015 I started keeping track of the games that I played during the year and have since then expanded my spreadsheet to included 2013 and most of 2012 all the way through the current year. Why do I do this? I honestly am not even sure at this point other than I enjoy making data points. The truth is that I used to use a service called Raptr and it was a great way of keeping track of what I had been playing at any given time. Once I moved away from it I lacked any meaningful way to collect the same sort of data for producing any sort of long term trends. In 2015 I started keeping track of things in a very simple format. If I played a game during a month, it got a tick mark regardless of how much time I spent playing that game. This allowed me to tabulate how many months during a year was I actually engaged with a specific title. There are ways to track things at a more granular level, but for me it was enough knowing what I happened to be playing at a specific time. This has allowed me to go back and see when I have dipped in and out of games like World of Warcraft or Rift, and when I actually started playing a new game for the first time. Since I started this officially in 2015, you might be wondering exactly how I was able to back populate up through 2012. The first way is that I am pretty prolific when it comes to taking screenshots in video games, in part because I need a constantly flow of them to break out the walls of text in these blog posts. At the time of writing this I have roughly 120 GB of screenshots in cold storage representing roughly 34,000 individual screenshots. I have an unknown number of active screenshots sitting in various directories on my machine that I have yet to file away properly but they represent roughly another 20 GB. On top of this my blog itself acts as a pretty great journal because if I am playing a game regularly, I am likely going to be talking about it. Combined this has given me a pretty good view of what I was doing at any point forward from 2013 when I first started the whole daily blogging thing.

Top Games Played of 2021

Top 17 Games Played of 2021
The rules for this whole experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game at all during a given month I fill in a box, and then tabulate the number of filled boxes to give me a number of months I played a game during the calendar year. There are going to be specific “forever games” that game a regular showing and then a bunch of games that I only play for one or two months at a time. The biggest difference this year is that I made an attempt to keep better track of the mobile games that I happened to be playing. As such you see games like Mitrasphere, Tales of the Wind, and Undead World: Hero Survival consuming a few months. When it comes to mobile games I have this pattern of installing one, playing for a few months out of boredom before I fall asleep at night and then never playing it again.
Total Games Played Per Calendar Year
A new feature this year is that I actually got my shit together and started keeping proper track of the total number of games that I have played in each of the years. Notice there is this sorta trend where I dip back and forth between 70ish game years and 40ish game years. I think more than anything this denotes just how involved I was with any specific games that ate up all of my time, or if I was floundering a bit and trying to find something to really sink my teeth into… but failing miserably. This was very much a year dominated by only a handful of games, but you can see how it ranks against other years in the above bar chart. Let’s specifically look at only the games that I spent more than three months playing.
  • New World – 11 Months
  • Final Fantasy XIV – 7 Months
  • Outriders – 6 Months
  • Elder Scrolls Online – 5 Months
  • Destiny 2 – 4 Months
This is a year where I played an excessive amount of New World. While the game only launched in September I was pretty active in alpha/beta testing all the way through from February onwards when I got into the permanent testing group. I also had a massive resurgence of Final Fantasy XIV this year starting in June and continuing on through the release of Endwalker in early December. Outriders was a pretty significant game for me as well with it taking up four months in a row and then my recent revisiting in November and December. In January of the year I got deeply involved with Elder Scrolls Online again and spent several months hanging out with friends there and leveling some of my very first alts in the game.
Comparing top 15 from 2020 and 2021
If we compare this year to last year… you are going to see a few games that are conspicuously missing. The year of 2021 was a year without Blizzard games almost entirely. This started as me simply being disillusioned with Shadowlands and being unhappy with the way that expansion rolled out. By January of 2021 I had entirely bounced off of that game. Then when the news about the awful working conditions and allegations of abuse hit, I decided that I wanted nothing to do with that company. This put an immediate halt to my reoccurring Diablo 3 plans and lead me to ignore the launch of Diablo 2 Resurrection. So when you take away a game that I played 12 months in 2020 and another that I played 9 months… the entire picture starts to look significantly different.

Top 15 of All Time

Top 15 Games Played of All Time
Another thing that I find interesting is how the games that I have played the most number of months shifts over time. The above graphic is sorted by total months played and shows 2019, 2020, and 2021. Now one thing that I need to talk about quickly is that some of the previous numbers were off significantly. When working on this years data I noticed that the numbers being tabulated were completely missing some of the past years, which means that some numbers went up a bit as compared to last years numbers. For example I did not play World of Warcraft at all this year but it is going to show that it went up to 75 over the 69 I listed last year. So with this correction in mind this is what the top 15 list looks like now.
  • World of Warcraft – 75 Total Months
  • Destiny 1/2 – 69 Total Months
  • Final Fantasy XIV – 67 Total Months
  • Diablo 3 – 55 Total Months
  • Elder Scrolls Online – 50 Total Months
  • Rift – 47 Total Months
  • Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
  • MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
  • Guild Wars 2 – 19 Total Months
  • Minecraft – 17 Total Months
  • Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
  • Monster Hunter World – 16 Months
  • The Division 1/2 – 16 Months
  • Everquest II – 14 Months
  • New World – 14 Months
Something I have never really done previously but decided to this year, was to create another chart that shows every game that I have played over 6 months in bar chart form. Here is what that looks like.
Total Months Played Per Game
For the most part the top six have held their places relative to each other for another year. World of Warcraft continues to hold onto that top spot, but having lost 12 months of play time… it is suffering. Destiny is also suffering a bit only having gained 4 months total as compared to Final Fantasy XIV with its 7 months of new play time. Diablo 3 only got 2 months worth of play time before I shut the door on all Blizzard games so it is going to suffer a bit in the future. Elder Scrolls continues to see regular revisits from me, but Rift is largely an artifact of a past era and now is standing there as a testament to what might have been. There is a significant drop down to Pokemon Go and MTG Arena, neither of which saw much play last year but still hold strong. What surprised me was that Guild Wars 2 is gaining traction, and I figure with the new expansion on its way I will spend some more time playing that. Minecraft gained a few months which honestly I always thought it deserved to be higher on the list given how emotionally important the game is to me. The real surprise is New World and how much I have spent playing it through all of the testing phases and now after launch. I really hope that game can make the necessary changes in order to be something that I want to revisit over time. I fully expect to stop playing it once the holiday event is over and I stop getting free easy expertise increases.

Longest Streaks

Most Number of Months Played Sequentially
This is something new that started last year based on a conversation that I had with my friend Tam. We were curious which games I had played the most number of months in a row without pause. This year I have expanded this a bit and added a bar chart to show games and length of a given streak. For the most part there is not a lot of change here, but we did add a new game to the “more than six months” list and technically there would have been two but I already had a much longer FFXIV streak. New World was added to the list with its eleven months, which is pretty solid to be honest as streaks go.

Another Year of Gaming

This year saw a significant number of changes to the format of this post. More than anything I just expanded upon some footnotes that I used to talk about in this final section and turned them into proper charts. As I said before this game was marked by a handful of games that I spent a lot of time playing, but that does not mean that I also did not have several one off experiences. For example I had twenty five games that I only booted up and played during one month, and among these were games like Dragon Age Inquisition that I played through to completion. I think more than anything we are all entering the third year of this pandemic and have had significant changes in the way we exist in life as a result. I know I did not expect most of the changes that have occurred in my own life, and would have had a hard time predicting any of them. I know for me at least I want to spend way less time in my office upstairs… where my gaming consoles and primary gaming rig are… because it also represents my work from home office. I play almost exclusively through Parsec now playing remote from my laptop downstairs and even most of my console gaming is done through a remote play app as well. It will be interesting to see what changes unfold during 2022, but for now I am not making any predictions. If you are curious about the past gaming trends since I have started this experiment you can find my posts dating back to 2015 below. The format for the 2015 post is not quite following what ultimately ended up as my standard going forward. If you are even more curious, you can check out the raw list of data that I have shared freely for years. I am still not certain why I started doing this, but it does make for an interesting tradition at the end of each year. The post Games Played 2021 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

The Mystery Store

Last night I had an interesting dream and since I am presently in vacation mode… and doing a pretty poor job of actually daily blogging I thought I would talk about it a bit. In the dream my wife and I were roaming around and drove past this massive line of people waiting to get into a building. I stopped to try and figure out what was going on, and someone said it was a “book sale” which piqued my wife’s interests. We stood in the long line and as we were getting close to the front we noticed that all of the products on the store were covered in wrapping to where you couldn’t tell what any one product actually was. Everything in the store was extremely cheap, but the one rule is that you had no idea exactly what you were buying. So for example in the book section it would be a book securely wrapped that said something like “Sci-Fi Book” and then a very vague synopsis of what the book was about. They a pretty wide variety of things that were not books as well. So you might find a box that said “Computer Monitor” and it listed some general specifications of the monitor like that it was capable of 1080p or 1440p. However the books were like a dollar or cheaper and the electronics were like $50 for one of those monitors.
The staff scurried around the tables constantly restocking items as it slowly trickled out of what had to be a massive stock of things. The end result was that it did not feel like those who were late getting there were at a significant disadvantage to those who got there first. We loaded up a cart of things that we were willing to take a gamble on and made our way to the checkout. It turns out one of the people who I went to High School was working the register and she filled in some other details about the store. It seems like every time they held one of these events they sold out completely, and that a lot of the things were assorted factory overstock that would not sell normally, but because of the cheap price and the mystery box conceit that it all went every single time. It was around this time that I woke up and told my wife about the dream. She immediately grasped the concept and I think a lot of the visuals were drawn from my own experiences going to one of these big sales. Half priced books is a chain that you may or may not have near you, and the store itself is phenomenal. However once or twice a year they rent out a convention center and have a big “everything must go” sale where they haul out box after box of things that were not moving in the stores for some reason. The above image is from one of these sales in Arlington Texas, and while we personally did not buy much I could absolutely see the appeal.
Connecticut Tigers Youth Mystery Box – Norwich Sea Unicorns Official Store
It does make me wonder how well a mystery box store would do. We seem to have this inherit desire to gamble on getting something really good from an unknown loot box. The assorted subscription box services like Loot Crate seem to still be doing really well for themselves. I know I personally have enjoyed when a store makes up grab bags just because there is some element of surprise to the process. The main difference with the store from my dreams though is that the items they were selling really were more valuable than the price they were selling them for. So often with mystery boxes you technically get more value on paper than what you paid, but it isn’t actually stuff that you would have wanted. Loot Crates seem to have a higher percentage of dollar store kitsch like stickers… than they do actual things that you would have spent money on in the first place.
I know Gamestop does this on the regular for anything that is not selling in their stores, and you can purchase a mystery box filled with toys. Far as I can tell these sell out pretty much every time they offer these. However from the various videos I have watched about them… they really are not worth the time or money spent on trying to get one. This leads me to believe that yes… a Mystery Box store would do exceptionally well. However it also leads me to believe that it would be a horrible value proposition for the actual consumer. The post The Mystery Store appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Midgar Reimagined

I am uncertain what it is about Christmas Vacation that makes me extra antisocial. Maybe it is the crowds and dealing with Christmas shopping, but whatever the case I tend to go through a turtle phase at the end of the year and beginning of the next. This is specifically heralded by me significantly increasing the number of single player types of games that I am engaged with. Last year at this time it was Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi Fallen Order then a foray into Knights of the Old Republic 2 in January. The year before that I was heavily engaged Witcher 2 and 3 and this pattern keeps going back as you look at what I am playing at the end/beginning of the year. Winter break seems to have been the time I actually re-engaged with Final Fantasy VII Remake and finally finished it. I have to say I really liked what they did with this. Not only did they spend a lot of time fleshing out areas of the game that buzzed by extremely quickly in the original game, but also taking the opportunity to change the story a bit. This is going into mild spoiler territory but if you have not caught on… Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a faithful recreation of the original and more a re-imagining of the game and with that comes an interesting plot device to explain those differences. I think it works well and I greatly appreciate the more action oriented style of gameplay… which again is a non-starter for some fans of the original. I greatly enjoyed the ride and look forward to the next “disc” worth of game when it releases.
I’ve moved on to Intergrade, which is the Yuffie adventure. So far this is extremely enjoyable and it has a completely different feel to the base “Remake”. While it weaves in an out of the story, it has an almost Cowboy Bebop vibe to it… which I think is largely influenced by the deep jazz cuts for the soundtrack. I am not very far into this side adventure but I think it will be an enjoyable way to finish out this week… if it lasts that long. After watching Witcher on netflix… I am having a deep desire to replay Witcher 3 which may end up happening. I also really want to try Red Dead Redemption 2 again to see if it can grab me this time around. I bounced pretty hard the first time but I have a good friend who absolutely loved it… so I might give it another shot. I don’t love the Rockstar style of open world games, but now that I better understand what the expectations are… maybe I can account for that in my expectations.
Lastly I am still poking my head into New World each day for long enough to collect 3 packages, make a gypsum orb, and make a sword cast to get expertise gains. I have to say the merger has had the opposite impact for me… in actually killing my desire to play the game. Firstly there is the challenge that there are exactly 3 covenant territories… and all three of them are the places where I have a home. Second there is the problem that on Minda Brightwood was one of the best late game crafting hubs… and on Frislandia it has been maintained by a bunch of slumlords who have done little to nothing to keep the crafting machines maintained. All of my crafting resources were centered around my tier 4 house in Brightwood… which sorta wrecks any desire to actually try and craft anything since there isn’t the resources I actually need there. So I am concerned that as people continue to leave the game… we might end up going through another round of mergers meaning that once again the structure of the towns and the machines in them could change. This really harms my enjoyment when I do not care at all about the PVP mini-game. My personal preference would be that crafting resources never downgrade, and once a town is tier 5 in everything… that it just stays that way because this nonsense of mergers downgrading towns has been a significant hardship. I am sure that once the Christmas event is over and I no longer get free upgrades and gold every day… that New World is going to fall by the wayside for me. The post Midgar Reimagined appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.