Hai Friends! Today is my Friday and I am apparently all over the place when it comes to my gaming. After not having played Outriders for a few days I returned and worked on some monster hunts. I had only really been focused on the Wanted quests since I was seeking legendary weapons. That said I should probably also start acquiring some legendary armor pieces, which are guaranteed for completing a full round of Monster Hunts. Thing I noticed immediately is that it seems Monster Hunts end up scaling more severely than the humanoid based Wanted quests. I struggled a bit at trying to take out the Monsters given their already more bullet sponge nature.
If you are so inclined I recorded another Outriders thing where I track down Bigjaw one of those aforementioned Monster Hunts. Last night I continued this process however and am now two hunts away from my free legendary. While doing this I also leveled the world up to tier 13… and noticed another significant jump in difficulty. I might have to grind for a bit in order to level my gear up to ilvl 40 before making much in the way of forward momentum. I might also swap over and start working on expeditions now that I’ve made some progress from the very raw starting location that I began with previously. World tier activities will take your ilevel up to 42 and expeditions will go all the way up to 50.
After several hunts I needed something a bit more relaxing so I headed downstairs and wrapped myself up in a cocoon of blankets and snuggling cats and finally played some Elder Scrolls Online. After the nonsense of grinding up alts and doing dailies for the anniversary quest, I have now returned to Murkmire and continued trying to help shy awkward Argonians hook up. It is a weird zone with an equally weird main story quest, but I am enjoying it because I am always down with strange lizard people stuff. I needed the super chill nature of ESO last night, and I really would like to keep moving forward that mission of catching up on the story before the impending expansion.
Lastly a reminder that if you are on Windows 10, you can apply for the PSO2 New Genesis Closed Beta but Microsoft had to make it weird. Firstly you have to install the Xbox Insider app… and you can find some directions on how to do this thing here. Next you will find one of the offers being the New Genesis closed beta and it is on a first come first serve basis… but seemingly right now everyone is getting in? The Closed Beta will run from May 14th at 6 pm PDT to May 16th at 7 pm PDT. Not a very long test but should allow us to pop in and kick the tires a bit on this new rendition of the PSO2 game setting. I plan on doing the thing and likely writing about it but you should also do the thing.
The post Helping Shy Lizards Hook Up appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. I have not been sleeping terribly well the last few nights which has lead me to be sorta walking through the world in a fog. I am not sure what is up but whatever the case I hope it passes soon. As a result I am not terribly certain I am up to some epic post, so instead you are going to get some blurbs about various things I am doing. Firstly I am still playing quite a bit of Outriders and am pretty much doing farming runs. Essentially in Trench Town there are two repeatable quests that reward quite a bit of gear in the process. The first of these is the Wanted posters that I have talked about before, but each individual quest rewards you a random epic or better weapon and doing the full sequence of ten quests rewards you a random legendary weapon. The other series is the Monster Hunts, which each reward a random piece of epic or better armor… with the full sequence rewarding you a piece of legendary armor.
I also find myself recording some more videos and I am not entirely certain why. There are just times that it is easier to talk about something while doing it and recording it in video form. One that I am releasing today shows off my favorite “loot cave”, which is actually just the outhouse mission over and over. I’ve also released a video of me doing a single Wanted quest on World Tier 11, and then another where I did two on World Tier 12 and got a random useless legendary weapon from turning in. If watching me do nonsense is your jam then by all means have at it. Like I know I will never have many viewers but I also find recording videos to be this weirdly relaxing extension of blogging? I push myself into the same sort of mindset as when I am writing and pretending that I am largely just talking to myself.
On a whim last night I started playing State of Decay 2 again and I mean I know precisely WHY I did it… but actually going through with reinstalling it and playing it was not terribly expected. One of the folks at Undead Labs, Geoffrey Card aka @Rangutang does these really enjoyable streams where he either plays State of Decay or explores some random game that he finds interesting. More recently he has been on a kick of playing State of Decay 2 again, because Undead Labs is leading up to some open beta on Steam and the combination of hanging out in chat while he played made me want to play. This is the problem I have with streaming… it doesn’t trigger a feeling of wanting to watch more of the stream but instead triggers a desire to just play the damned game myself.
So last night I started a brand new group of survivors. Things were going awesome until they suddenly were not and I wound up losing two people when tangling with some bandits that stole an allied groups meds. I did manage to relocate us to a new base of operations centered around a truck stop. Now I need to find a programmer so I can loot a drop pod that is taking up one of my spaces, so that I can build something useful there for my community instead of it just taking up space.
Lastly I am still playing Elder Scrolls Online, and by playing I mean logging in every night to loot my daily reward cache and train mounts on my four 50s. I allowed myself to get into the bad pattern of just logging in every character and doing crafting writs during the recent holiday event, and I need to actually get back into questing and doing something more enjoyable. The combination of the Jesters Festival and the Anniversary event meant that I devoted a bunch of time to grinding up three characters from low levels to the level cap. This however sorta knocked the wind out of my sails because it got me out of the pattern of logging in and questing each night. I need to get back into that because it is that sort of thing that keeps me engaged in the game. Unfortunately I have been in the pattern of “maintenance gaming” where I just log in to do dailies and then immediately log right back out.
I am not entirely certain what is going to win when it comes to my play time. I had a lot of fun last night playing State of Decay 2 and I expect that I will probably play some more of that in the coming evenings. Then given how exhausted I am right now… it is highly likely that I might just crash at some point rather than spend much time gaming in the first place. I wish I knew why I was not sleeping well, because I sure would love a good nights sleep.
The post Accidents with Zombie Survivors appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Friends! Like all weekends this one went way the heck too fast. I ended up taking off Friday but a good chunk of that was spent taking my dad to the doctor and running errands. As far as activities this weekend they fall into three distinct buckets. Firstly I managed to finish leveling my Bow Nightblade which is the last of the characters that I was planning on leveling while the buff was active. I am contemplating maybe putting a few of the easily levels on the new Sorcerer Tank experiment, but I am absolutely not going to do the grind all the way to level 50. What I really need to spend the next few weeks doing is burning through all of the treasure maps that I have clogging my inventory and bank from doing the Dark Anchor grind.
I need to spend some time evaluating pricing on the guild store so that I can maybe move some of this stuff more quickly. Right now I have my 30 slots filled and I wish there was a way to be able to sell more items without joining additional trade guilds. I guess it makes sense why folks have more trade guilds than pretty much anything else. On the radar is a return to running content on my main because I still would love to be caught up to the point of being able to start the new expansion fresh in June when it lands. I don’t think there is a shot in hell of that happening however, which again is a me thing… because anyone can start the new content day one. I just have this hang up about wanting to complete content in the order it was released.
Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was working on my nonsense playlist. At the time of writing this I am up to 894 songs for a grand total of 59 hours and 47 minutes of play time. Considering that I am using shuffle and spotify doesn’t seem to play through everything once before repeating… it is highly likely I will actually listen to everything on it but it makes a good radio that brings me joy. I am still periodically adding things to it as I think about them, but I am probably going to start creating some focused “mixtape” playlists and sharing them with you as well. I am not sure if this brand of nonsense is down anyone’s alley, but I am enjoying it.
Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was catching up on Outriders. I attempted to play a bit when it launched but have been otherwise occupied, first with the Diablo 3 Season 23 and later with grinding my Nightblade in Elder Scrolls. The first thing that I did was turn off the thing that keeps increasing your world level because this felt a little weird. My power gained from dropped items was just not keeping up with the difficulty increase and it sorta felt like being dropped into Torment 1 in Diablo 3 before being fully geared. I’ve now set the world level to 3 aka what they call “Normal” and am back to enjoying myself.
I am sure at some point I will write a general review of the game, but one of the bigger takeaways is just how bleak it is. Like I have played some bleak games… but this one is on a whole new level. It seems like so often you meet a character that seems interesting, and then in a very Walking Dead fashion… they callously kill them off with a stray bullet or something else that feels meaningless. I think this is absolutely on purpose to illustrate just how bad of shape the world is, but it does grate on you a bit as you continue to play. I hope that as I keep moving forward I will eventually start to see a glimmer of hope, because right now the straights are much dire.
That is all folks. I hope you have a great week. I seem to have jacked up my sleep patterns and am personally hoping that settles out.
The post Twelve Bleaks out of Ten appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Friends! Now that I have finished the Diablo 3 Season 23 grind, that means I have more or less defaulted back to trying to finish my Nightblade off in Elder Scrolls Online. There are still several more days of the Anniversary Festival and with that the double experience buff that comes from eating cake. I personally find this pretty chill and relaxing to just hop in and join one of the auto groups and grind away until my bags fill. While doing this I have been spending quite a bit of time recently listening to music, which is odd to say that I have not done in a very long time. I have no clue what happened because music used to be such a critical part of my life, but over the years I gravitated more and more towards instrumental music… and then just stopped listening to something in the background all together.
This most recent foray has been thanks to my good friend Bells, which I realize is somewhat confusing given that I go by Bel with one L. She has created a handful of really good playlists that are theme based with the most recent one being centered around the music of Generation X, or at least those of us growing up at a very particular age. Listening to this feels like I transported back to being seventeen again and cruising around in my beat up 1977 Honda Civic Hatchback. If you are interested then I highly suggest this playlist, and I also really enjoy her punk playlist as well.
I admittedly am pretty new to using Spotify, which I know sounds weird given how ubiquitous it has become. I am by no means a stranger to streaming audio, I just went down a different path to arrive here. Originally I was a huge proponent of Pandora, because with the closing of Oink’s Pink Palace I was looking for a new discovery engine more than anything else. I was no longer listening to the radio and with it I needed a new vehicle for discovering new music that I might like. From there I shifted over to Google Music and was there until they started screwing with it and trying to turn it into YouTube Music. After that I had a brief stint with Amazon Music but kept running into gaps in their inventory of songs which lead me to finally subscribe to Spotify.
One of the things that I didn’t love about Google Music was the lack of a way to publicly share a playlist with someone else… and actually allow them to listen to it. This is something that is solved with Spotify and recently I have been working on my own stupidly large playlist. It is far from complete and likely never will be… but if you are so inclined I give you Bel’s Confusing Blend. I highly suggest listening to it on shuffle given that there are large blocks of the same artist right now in a row. It is intended more as a radio station style experience and shuffle mostly does that. I sorta wish I had the ability to pre-shuffle the list and at some point I might actually sort it by hand to make it flow a little better but for now it is what it is.
One of the things that I used to love as a kid is creating mix tapes and I might start doing that again. A mix tape was a specific vehicle where the songs flowed in a specific way as to invoke a particular feeling. I miss doing this and if I can find some of the ones I created in the past for friends, I might port them over, but I have no clue if I saved any of that. I lost most of my musical archives at one point which is ultimately what lead me to embrace streaming. Today is going to be a bit of a busy day, but at least I will have a personal soundtrack to nurture me.
The post Rediscovering Playlists appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
