Hey friends, I am doing okay. Like barely okay at times but still mostly functional. The situation with my mom is significantly worse than I realized going into this, so I am going to be spending a lot of my mental and emotional energies there. My Dad however seems to have gone through surgery just fine and is recovering quickly. It is predicted that he is going to be released and I will be going over to the town he is in to pick him up. The challenge however is that I will not be returning him to the home I grew up in, but instead this other house that my family has used as swap space. My ancestral home is a bit of a death trap, and there simply isn’t enough time to get it prepared for someone that just had hip surgery.
So all of that is super fucking stressful and as a result my blog entries are going to be real sporadic for awhile. My folks live 40 minutes away and I am spending a lot of my time driving over there to check in on things. Today I am heading back because there are a whole slew of things that have to get done before 10 am… when I am apparently needed at my aunts house (the swap space) to accept delivery of one of those stand up chairs. Which means I need to get off the computer, pack up the dishes that I took home to wash and the laundry that I took home to wash and get on the road.
I hope you are all doing fine. I am also riddled with anxiety about the turn out of the election. I voted in person yesterday and that was its own nightmare fuel. Statistically I was sitting in a room with likely a dozen or so folks with Covid-19 and mask usage was non-compulsory and social distancing was nigh impossible. I am scared about now going and being around my aging folks… but they need help in a way that I cannot deliver remotely. Up until this point I have pretty much been in serious quarantine with every little interaction with the outside world. Here is hoping that I did in fact manage to make it through yesterday without exposure.
Keep me and my family in your thoughts because I have a feeling we will need it. I wanted to write something this morning since I really hate having missed yesterday. All that said… the blog is going to slip for awhile and for that I am sorry.
The post Irregular Schedule appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Not going to bury the lead with this one, especially given that I talked at length about it on twitter. This weekend I finally managed to get the Headless Horseman’s Reins. I have been chasing this off and on since 2008 when the event was first patched into the system. That first year I tried to tank it for anyone who was willing to let me use their summon. Back then each player got one chance to click on the pile every day, and as a result you could summon it for a group that didn’t have the ability to summon it themselves. I attempted to tank it for everyone that would allow me to use their summon and saw it drop so many times, but each time lost the roll.
Once it went to a personal loot system, where the boss drops a loot bag and the mount is contained within it… I ran it on pretty much any character that was eligible. I have been chasing this with varying degrees of vigor for twelve years, and this year given that I have so many max level and near max level characters I made a hardcore push to attempt to get it. At the beginning of my run I had thirteen characters eligible for the mount, given that you have to be at least level 45 (pre-squish 110) in order to get the right kind of loot bag. As the event ran I kept leveling more characters to the minimum level and as a result expanded my roster of attempts to nineteen. If my calculations and memory is correct of the sequence of when I leveled which characters… I ran it in total 206 times before finally getting it.
Probably the coolest part about the entire process is the fact that when it FINALLY dropped… it dropped for my OG Main Belghast the Human Warrior. This was the character I started the chase from all those years ago. This was the character that I would beg people to get their daily summon all for a shot of getting the mount. Why did I care so much? Well I have always loved this mount model and I have Attumen’s mount that I won fair and square while we were running Karazhan. However none of the other versions of this model can fly, which greatly cuts down the utility of the mount. The best part about all of this is that I never have to do Horseman ever again pending I don’t want some free rings for alts.
What did I do AFTER getting the mount? Well I proceeded to start working on my lowest level horde character my shadow priest. I think I finally found a character that the Eternal Traveler set actually suits. So I am now spending the last days before the pre-patch lands running a low level character through BFA which is supremely weird. In some ways it makes BFA much easier, and in other ways… it is just a pain in the ass not to have flight again. I should in theory be able to train flight in a few levels when I ding 30, and last night if I am remembering correctly I hit 28. Still working on the first zone of BFA so you end up moving through the levels at a pretty good clip.
In other less enjoyable news. Yesterday my Dad was out working in the pasture and was just about to hop on the tractor and move it, when he lost his footing and took a really bad fall. He landed in such a way as to crack the ball part of his hip joint and separate it. I found out about the time he was being taken to the hospital, and given Covid protocols no one is being allowed back with him. We’ve thankfully been able to talk to him off and on over cell phone. Essentially they are going to treat this like a hip replacement and at some point this morning he is going to have surgery that removes the effected joint and replaces it with an artificial one.
What makes this more complicated is that my Mom is effectively bed ridden, or at the very least has very limited mobility. So my focus has been trying to make sure she is okay. I spent three or four hours up there yesterday making sure she was settled and locking down my dad’s shop and retrieving the key from the tractor out in the pasture. It is no wonder he fell because just in my traversal to get the key I ended up tweaking my ankle when what I thought was stable ground was significantly less stable than I thought. She is set for now, and am going to call her in a few hours to check in. I will likely run up there tonight just to make sure she is doing okay.
The thing is… I have no clue what the schedule for the next few days is going to look like right now. I am making a post this morning but I have no clue if and when I will make posts from this point forward until the situation is stabilized. I greatly thank you all for the comments that I have received over twitter. Yall rock, simple as that. Basically my life is going to be real weird for awhile so I will update as time allows.
The post The Horseman and Dad appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I remember when Uplay+ was first announced… I threw it some serious sideeye. Why would anyone pay for a subscription service to play games that regularly go on seriously deep discount sales? Now I stand on the precipice of partaking of it myself and have a slightly different perspective. At that point there really wasn’t much that I wanted to play from UbiSoft that I did not already own, or could not purchase easily. Now we are in a time of gold and ultimate edition games that double the price of entry if you so choose to partake, and also on the cusp of a banner sequence of game releases from the studio.
Over the coming months I want to play the following:
Watch Dogs Legion – Available Today – $120 for the Ultimate Edition
Asssassin’s Creed Valhalla – November 10th – $120 for the Ultimate Edition
Immortals Fenyx Rising – December 3rd – $100 for the Gold Edition
Farcry 6 – February 18th – $120 for the ultimate edition
My natural instinct tends to be to go for that ultimate edition so that I don’t have buyers remorse later when there is some shiny doodad or thingamabob that I don’t have access to. I know it is a bad habit and a first world problem but it is a thing for me at least. Were I to stack up all of those games in the highest version I would be dropping $460 over the course of the next several months… or to put that into perspective almost the cost of a RTX 3070 graphics card.
This morning I stared down the barrel of the Uplay page trying to decide what I wanted to do. I want to play Watch Dog Legions, but did I want to go ahead and just purchase it outright or pay $15 to start a Uplay+ subscription. Even if I went for the Vanilla versions of all four games I listed that adds up to $240 and an entire year of Uplay+ is $180. Yes I realize in the second scenario I don’t own any of the games but my current running theory is that I subscribe for a few months, get my enjoyment out of the titles and then if for some reason I actually care enough about one of the games to own it… I pick it up later when Ubisoft has their deep discount sales like they often do aligned with Steam sales.
What I have realized is that I don’t return to single player games that often. Sure I have played copious amounts of Fallout and Elder Scrolls games… but I think they might be the exception rather than the rule. I played Assassin’s Creed Origins hard and heavy for a good while and then walked away from it seemingly never to return. While I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Witcher 3, that game was intensive enough that I can’t see myself actually returning to it again. The modern open world game requires so much of you, that once the story is played out… I think it just becomes a challenge to really revisit it. Sure I loved my revisit of Horizon Zero Dawn recently, but that was a case of me experiencing the game through fresh eyes of playing with my chosen platform of Keyboard and Mouse.
I’ve been on the digital download bandwagon for a decade now, and I am starting to wonder if games are shifting around for me much like Movies and Music did. I no longer care about owning any music. What I care about is having access to music when I choose play it and as a result I pay for a streaming subscription. Similarly I don’t care about owning movies, because it is so rare that I will ever sit down and re-watch one. What I care instead is having access to them on the rare occasion that I want to… and for that I also have streaming services. Maybe I have evolved to a point of caring deeply about a small number of games, but wanting access to others just for the purpose of playing them and then dropping them by the wayside.
There we have it… Uplay+ got me and I am now downloading Watch Dog Legions off the subscription plan. I need to set myself a reminder to cancel the service in March, because I can’t really see this being something I want to keep going permanently. It isn’t so much that I cannot afford to buy these games piecemeal over the next several months… but more a case that I didn’t really want to. I didn’t want to shell out that much money in one lump sum. We will see how well this goes and what hidden pitfalls there might be, and I will of course report back how it is going. Anyone else suddenly find the subscription option for UbiSoft significantly more tantalizing with the sequence of releases on the horizon? Maybe I will actually sit down and play through some of the Anno games that I have never touched now that I have access to them all.
The post Uplay+ Finally Makes Sense appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Originally I had no plans of talking about this, but I woke up this morning with some thoughts. Also I have to go into the office today and I had hoped this would be a relatively fast discussion. There are a lot of different opinions about the slipping of the Cyberpunk 2077 release date. First let me state that after having devoured the Witcher 2 and 3 along with all of the DLC content… I was absolutely looking forward to this game. The folks that are pissed about the game date slipping once again have a right to be, especially considering the track record of this title. Here is a brief run down of the announced release dates so far.
April 16th
September 17th
November 19th
December 10th
So I can absolutely see getting pissed about the constantly siding date range. Truthfully I would not be terribly shocked if we see another delay that pushes the game into the first quarter of 2021. There is obviously something going on behind the scenes that we are not entirely privy to that is making the release strained. My pocket theory is that this game originally targeted the 8th Generation consoles, but as time went on the scope of the game outgrew them and it is now something more proper for the 9th Generation of consoles and beyond. However preorders have been taken and commitments have been made to make this thing work on the original Xbox One and the original PlayStation 4… which are significant downgrades to where we are currently in console gaming.
This isn’t even the only high profile delay in the release of a game that is impacting me. I should have been playing the Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft right now as I was happily grinding my way to the next level cap and hunting for gear. I am not however doing that thing and in the case of both games I am more or less fine with that. How many games have been released over the last several years that we have commented could have used another six months to a year of time baking? How many times are games salvaged by a Hail Mary patch or expansion after months of a frustrated fan base? For me at least it is far better to launch later with a game that represents the best ability of that studio than to push something out the door that the fans are going to hate at worst and at best be disillusioned by. You can only do that so many times before you lose the benefit of the doubt.
Let us think back to what should be known as “The Parable of Anthem”, a game that was frankly brilliant in the type of gameplay that it was delivering but released in such an incomplete state that I legitimately don’t know anyone still playing it. Even the most hardcore of Anthem Zealots have long since set the game aside and moved on to greener pastures. I for one loved a lot of what was there from the moment to moment gameplay and the story being told… but the game as it released felt like the opening chapter of something larger and not a finished product. No one has really nailed the games as a service model if I am going to be completely honest about it. You need to hit the ground running with four or five rapid releases waiting in the wings in order to keep the player base engaged.
Anthem struggled from a lack of content on all levels. There weren’t enough activities to complete and there wasn’t enough different ways to obtain gear. The end result was that they just made it damned near impossible to get the highest rewards or that when you did get them they were mostly useless. I am deeply concerned by the level of redesign that is happening as they work on Anthem 2.0, because for me… the fundamentals were fairly strong. Significant work was needed on the itemization system and other than that… they just needed about five times the content that they launched with and a pipeline of future updates to keep the players going. If they had another year or two of development time I think Anthem would have launched as a highly successful product, and instead it is a game that becomes the horror story that we apply to every single launch since.
Another game that launched in a completely incomplete state was Fallout 76. Effectively this game was a tech demo that legitimately was built for fun within Bethesda… that got “productized” and felt just about as polished as that sounds. While subsequent content releases and patches have turned this into an extremely enjoyable experience, the damage is done. Bethesda burned players early and many will not be likely to ever return to the experience, even though they have already spent the cost of entry. The old adage of only getting one chance to make a first impression is true. You will forever be judged by the first moments of gameplay that you give your players and if that is a buggy mess then your game will always be broken and horrible in their eyes.
No Man’s Sky for example should be heralded as the comeback story that all games deserve. The amount of love and care that has gone into the later phases of this game is significant. The game that exists today resembles almost nothing of the game that launched back in 2016. To the credit of Hello Games, every single one of these broad content updates has been delivered to the players completely free. All one has to do is patch the game up and they can be playing this revolutionary experience, but for many players that is still a bridge too far. There are folks that hold a grudge about this game and the fact that it did not deliver on the promises on day one and nothing that this studio can do will ever fix that core problem. Do I think that stance is unrealistic? Absolutely, but it doesn’t change the fact that bridges were burned that can never be mended.
Basically I am always going to be fine with a video game delay because the alternative is so much worse. I often wonder what my beloved Destiny would have been like had they the time to really have built the franchise into what it could have been from day one. It took until The Taken King expansion to turn Destiny 1 into the game that we have come to cherish, and the same story played out with Destiny 2 and The Forsaken turning a mess of a launch into an exceptionally enjoyable experience. While I don’t love the direction that the game has gone in recently with season fatigue and expiring content, the game that came out of the two rough starts has been something I have fallen in love with. Yet there will always be a group of players that were burnt by the releases not being finished at launch and will likely never give Destiny another chance.
Essentially I am fine with these game delays pending it actually improves the product that is being released. If you delay a game and still release a buggy and unfinished mess, then I guess there is nothing I can say to stop the avalanche of anger that will be dropped upon that studio. I am hoping that Cyberpunk 2077 will truly be game of the year material and I am hoping that the Shadowlands expansion ranks high on my list of favorites. I have to say that in both cases I am a little concerned, and I hope the delays give both studios the time to apply that layer of polish so we can just boot that game up and lose ourselves in the experience. This is a year when escapism is a critical survival mechanism, so please stick that landing.
The post Regarding Game Delays appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
