Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey folks it is that time again, time for the Games of the Year show. As is often the case we ended up with way too many things to talk about and could in no way fit them into a single show. As a result I will bring you part one this week and next week it will conclude with part two. We have nineteen games to discuss this year, which means we left some ten honorable mentions on the cutting room floor just because there was nowhere near enough time. This is probably the most diverse list of games that we have compiled because as a group there was not a whole lot of overlap in the titles we played this year.
Without further waffling I bring you the first round of discussion.
I am going to warn you my fair readers, today’s post is going to contain spoilery discussion about the latest Disney Plus series The Book of Boba Fett. At this point two episodes have been released, and I have to admit I have some serious doubts about this show. I find myself vacillating wildly between “I am just not feeling this” and thoughts of “Does this actually sucks?”. This morning I am going to talk through my feelings and thoughts, and since I often times use this blog as therapy… will maybe come to some grand conclusion or at least acceptance after writing all of it.
Firstly I feel like we need to talk about how important of a character Boba Fett has been to me throughout the years. My first action figure of Boba Fett was obtained through collecting Kenner purchase seals and mailing away… then waiting what felt like an insane amount of time before finally getting it into my hands. So my fear going into Book of Fett is that I might be a little too close to the source material. While I realize we are in this weird place of Disney officially exiling all of the content that came from before as “Legends”, Dave Filoni is two years older than I am so very much a child of this era and has been cherry picking the best bits. I rabidly consumed everything that I could get my hands on that was Boba Fett related from the Dark Horse comics to Tales of the Bounty Hunters collection of short stories.
I loved seeing Boba Fett return through the Mandalorian series, but also felt no shock in seeing him. In fact from the onset of that series and the moment that we arrived on Tatooine I assumed sooner or later we would see him. Boba Fett escaping from the Sarlacc Pitt is a well trodden story at this point for me, and while I was uncertain exactly HOW they would portray it… I knew that effectively Boba was still active somewhere. I have this very hard time cloistering everything I “know” from the Legends universe and not just expecting the “Saga” universe to play out in the same manner. So far the parts of the extended universe that worked… are starting to make their way into what is ultimately becoming this new Disney Star Wars Canon.
Seeing Boba Fett with the Tusken Raiders really was not a shocking revelation either. Again because of the vast archives of expanded universe… I know a shocking amount about the civilization of the Tusken Raiders through comics, games, and books and there is a big part of me that has just sorta had this “well duh” moment play out as I am watching Fett so far. It made perfect sense that Fett who always seemed like an honor bound bounty hunter… would fit in perfectly with a society of nomadic people who are also extremely honor bound. In the movies I guess up to this point we have had the Tusken’s portrayed as this roaming band of monsters, but they were always more to me personally. The Tusken’s are just the native race of Tatooine and survived the ecological fallout of the world by adapting to living under extreme conditions.
I think the core problem I am having right now with Book of Fett, is it feels like one of those catch up reels that plays at the beginning of a new season of a Netflix series. Everything that is being shown to me is either well trodden legends content or something that completely makes sense and is a logical sequence of events knowing the characters that are so far involved. What I don’t understand however… is why in the hell Boba Fett has decided that suddenly he wants to be a Crime Lord and thinks that he alone can take on the Hutts. We are spending so much time with flashbacks and covering content that I was more than happy to have hand waved away because it “just made sense” and spending little time so far dealing with what is happening in the here and now. I had hoped that we had dealt with most of the flashbacks in the first episode… but the second episode also largely was comprised with Boba Fett and the Tuskens.
The other core issue I have with Book of Fett is it is missing something that The Mandalorian had. There is this emotional fabric that the Mandalorian had that is just completely gone with Fett. Sure there is a buddy cop sort of relationship going on between he and Fennec Shand, and that is delightful when it is actually allowed to play out. What we instead get is Boba Fett being super confused why no one seems to fear him or respect his authority when he has done nothing really to earn that place of respect. Maybe that is the tale that we are setting up… Fett being overwhelmed and then having to earn his place as the Daimyo. I get the distinct feeling that Fett wants to effectively Unionize the crime syndicate and create this mutually beneficial relationship between him and his vassals. So I can see a redemption arc working if in the next episode he is knocked down hard by the Hutt Twins who arrived at the end of episode two.
I would be lying if I said I was not going to at least finish out this season. Having the appearance of Black Krrsantan was some serious fan service that I did not expect, and I think on some level a lot of this show is just supposed to be Boba Fett looking badass while we drift along on the fumes of “member berries“. I think the problem for me at least is I know Disney is capable of producing great short run series that help flesh out these worlds. Loki and Hawkeye for example were freaking pure brilliance. Similarly I have loved The Mandalorian because it was telling a fresh story in this universe that I love. The problem is so far Boba Fett is not really telling a fresh story but instead reliving bits and pieces of past stories that I already knew. I think Fett should be a lesson to Disney going forward, since they plan on resurrecting pretty much any character that is even vaguely capable of supporting a limited run show. The show has to stand on its own in order to actually be good, and can’t just be the television equivalent of a really cool looking action figure.
I will say Book of Boba Fett gives me serious concerns about how it is going to feel to experience some of these other shows that are coming soon. The Cassian Andor and Obi-Wan Kenobi solo shows are slotted to release at some point during this year for example. I think the core problem with Star Wars has been that unlike Marvel… they don’t have nearly as much source material to mine. For example if you point at any character in the Marvel Universe… and you can find literally thousands of unique story lines from the comics that expand upon that character. For Star Wars you have a few movies and then a string of books… a good number of which were read by old farts like me who were desperate for ANY Star Wars anything during the dark times. With Marvel they could mix and match and lean heavily on the multiverse theory to craft something that while assembled out of bits and pieces of existing story material… felt fresh and new. With Star Wars… my fear is that these solo projects are all going to feel like this one… with a certain measure of rehash required to catch everyone else up before actually crafting new additional stories.
If you have made it to this point in my post… what are your thoughts about Book of Boba Fett so far? Are you also having issues with it, or is this just a “you are too close to the source material” issue. Drop me a line below.
The post Does Book of Fett Suck? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning friends! I thought this morning I would take a bit on the blog to talk about me and Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much not done with the game, but the current congestion situation that we find ourselves in has made it much harder for me to play “on a whim”. I’ve been doing my normal end of the year/beginning of the year binge of single player games. However normally when I am in this mode I am still logging in at least once a day into the MMORPGs I am playing at the same time. Generally speaking at least once per day I would log in, maybe do a roulette or deal with my retainers and then log back out. The challenge however is that I plan on the highest population data center and one of the highest population servers period.
When I was working on the Main Story Quest for Endwalker, I had a pretty rigorous routine of logging in at a specific time during the day so that I could be through the queue when I got “off work”. The queue would idle in the background and tick down as I finished out my afternoon and then could be ready to make progress in the story. The drive to do this was there because the story of Endwalker was so damned good. What has happened since then however is that I fell out of the routines I had been engaged with because I was in “vacation mode”. This means that by the time I think about logging in, it is usually early evening and the queues are already madness.
Earlier this week I tried to make my way through. I logged in as soon as I got off work, and then proceeded to go about my daily routine of fixing dinner and feeding the animals. About an hour and a half later we were sitting at the lower number. Meaning in that hour and a half I made it roughly one third of the way through the initial queue. My quick napkin math told me I had at least 2-3 more hours before I could make my way in… at which point I bailed out and gave my slot to someone else who needed it more. Finishing the MSQ took away a lot of my drive to fight through that queue because I know at some point in the future I can catch back up pretty easily. Instead I have been spending that time focused on playing games that are also bringing me joy… but can more easily be played on my schedule.
Once I burn through this current phase of single player games, if the state of the queues is still this rough I might even poke my head back into Elder Scrolls Online. I am still woefully behind the main story and sitting somewhere in Summerset at the moment. Which means I still have a mount of content in front of me before I am even vaguely ready for the new expansion that they are already teasing. So to recap…. very much not done with Endwalker and Final Fantasy XIV but the queues are making it very difficult to muster the desire to fight my way through them at the moment.
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I am spending an excessive amount of time roaming around the world of Witcher 3. Last night I finally wrapped up most of the loose ends in the Velen/Novigrad areas and made my way over to the Isle of Skellige. I specifically love this sequence of the game, so often times I try and wrap everything up so that when I get there I can feel like I can really explore it freely. Writing blog posts when I am actively playing a story driven game… that features a large number of spoilers for anyone who has NOT played it… always lands in this really weird place for me. I don’t want to accidentally ruin an experience for someone that might follow in my footsteps and become interested in the game. However at the same time there is only so much time that I can spend talking about things in only the most general of terms.
Instead this morning I thought I would talk about some of the care and feeding of this current Witcher 3 play through. If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know that I greatly favor the PC as a platform, and one of the main reasons behind this apart from my love of keyboard and mouse controls is the fact that I can easily modify the game to behave the way I want it to. If there is something that annoys me with a console game, I basically have to make a decision if I am going to suck it up and deal with it… or just quit playing the game. On the PC however we have another option… to fix whatever behavior I personally find offending and then move on with the modified and more enjoyable experience. Along with most of the internet… I use NexusMods as my core source for all my modding needs and maintain a subscription to it just to speed up data transfers.
I am going to take a little bit and talk about the mods that I am running on this particular play through of the game.
Over 9000 – Weight Limit Mod
One of the things that I hate almost more than anything in a big open world like this is being limited in my ability to loot and scoot. I hate inventory management. It is legitimately the bane of my existence in games, and when I can either install a mod or run a console command and never have to worry with it ever again… I am always going to take that option. Thankfully the mod scene has made this extremely painless and given me a mod that takes my item weight limit from around 100 to 9999. This allows me to run around for days without caring about managing items while still looting until my heart is content.
Going hand in hand with this is a mod that just automagically loots everything when you kill anything or interact with a container. It converts the notifications to a little toast window in the lower lefthand corner of the screen giving you a quick notification of everything that was just sucked into your inventory. The specific variant that I am running is the file set that will keep you from accidentally stealing anything. I am contemplating swapping over to the Herbs and Corpses variant however which apparently auto picks up any herbs that you run past that are in your loot radius. If a corpse has an item on it needed for quest progress, you still have to manually loot it.
The map in Witcher 3 is massive, and this one is largely a quality of life change to make navigating around a bit easier. By default you have to make your way back to a signpost marked in green on your map, which will then allow you to teleport to any other signpost you have already unlocked. This mod is pretty straight forward and cuts out the travel time allowing you to just crack open the map and teleport directly. This is phenomenal for when you have fought your way down into an area and are nowhere near civilization and just want to pop back to town to do something quickly. Essentially it makes Witcher work more like other games with fast travel points.
The older I get the harder time I have with nighttime and picking out details… and this carries forward with video games as well. In general if I am running around at night in Witcher 3, I have my torch out but there are a number of actions that keep you from using your torch. One of these for example is piloting a boat and this mod simply adds a torch to every boat in the game giving you some illumination. It also makes it way easier to spot the boats in the world scattered along the coastline. Like most of the mods I am using it is the little quality of life things that I tend to tweak.
One of the cool features that was added into the game with the Blood and Wine expansion, is the ability to dye certain armor sets. This is a feature that I did not even know existed until I went searching for a mod to change the look of my favorite armor set. I love the Ursine Witcher armor, but I am not a big fan of the cream/green/red look that it comes with by default. What I wanted was the ability to dye my armor black like a proper Witcher armor should be. Now you cannot even start the Blood and Wine expansion before level 35, and the dyes don’t show up on vendors until then… but this mod changes that and makes a large number of vendors around the early parts of the game sell armor dyes and for cheap. Now I have my Ursine armor in darker shades and am significantly happier with life.
That is it folks. Those are all of the mods that I happen to be running at this moment. There is one that I have been eyeing that changes the scabbards for the swords to black but I have not messed with installing it because often times you have to deal with mod conflicts. For example there is an addon that I would love to use that marks every quest that you have in your journal on your map, so that you can know if there are other quests in the near vicinity that you can complete at the same time. However it conflicts with the Fast Travel mod, and I have not wanted to mess with figuring out how to manually merge the two. For me a lot of the mods that I end up using remove friction that I do not personally find meaningful. Modding is ultimately just that a very personal choice, and while I would not say anything that I am doing is “required” to enjoy the game it absolutely improves my enjoyment.
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