Magic Blue Smoke

Good Morning Friends. This is going to be a bit of a light spoiler day because yesterday I caught up with the last few Marvel movies that I had not seen. First I finally got around to watching Black Panther Wakanda Forever. I was not entirely certain how a film without Chadwick Boseman would go, but in the grand scheme of things I think it went pretty great. I’ve always liked Shuri, but what I really liked was the quirky scientist character she was allowed to be. Shuri as Panther was also enjoyable but did not feel as uniquely “her” for lack of a better term. I thought overall the film was enjoyable but lacked the clear focus that the first film had. I think that is the problem with the current crop of Marvel films… they feel like they don’t quite know what exactly they are building towards. The highlight of the film for me was further world-building and seeing both Namor and Talokan.
Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania was another big world-building movie bringing us finally to the Quantum Realm. Again I think that the movie itself was fun, but lacked a lot of the focus that the earlier outings had. It sorta felt like a D&D campaign where your GM just kept throwing new faces and locations at you without giving you much in the way of the backstory behind any of them. We know Kang is a big bad because we have been told over and over that he is a big bad, but it feels like it isn’t something that has necessarily been earned. For Thanos, we saw the effects of him long before he took the field, so, as a result, he was a bad guy that we fully grasped and respected without having to keep explicitly stating that “this dude is really powerful and bad”. I enjoyed the spectacle of the movie and the settings… but it doesn’t feel like we got enough time with any of it to really matter before booping us back to reality again.
In electronics work, there is a term called “Magic Blue Smoke” that happens when you phenomenally screw something up. There are usually some sparks, the air is filled with the smell of ozone, and a little puff of blueish-grey smoke billows up from the object. After this point, it is completely dead and no amount of poking and prodding is going to bring it back from the dead without replacing some major components. I feel like the Magic Blue Smoke has left the Marvel projects, and while they are interesting spectacles they are missing both the core focus that the pre-endgame sequence had and also missing a lot of the heart. I think this is what happens when you truly stick the landing and complete the story in a largely satisfying fashion, and anything more just ends up cheapening the experience. I’ve felt this a few times before with franchises, and I think Marvel as far as movies go is “done”. I still enjoy them for what they are, but the magic is gone and I am uncertain it will ever truly come back.
I feel similarly about Final Fantasy XIV and how Endwalker was the extremely satisfying conclusion to a ten-year journey. I’ve struggled with returning to the game because I no longer have that narrative driving me forward and making me want to crave more knowledge. FFXIV is still a technically competent game and I am sure will keep producing interesting content, but the journey I was on has finished. I am uncertain what the next journey is going to look like, but they will need to hook me in the same way they did with A Realm Reborn in order to get me to commit to following the next one. I’ve reached a level of maturity in gaming to understand that is what is happening, and not that the game is somehow “worse”. In fact the game is probably in the best state it has ever been in, but the adventure I was on has finished.
Looking back with wisdom… I think this is ultimately what caused me to peel away from World of Warcraft. At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the story had reached a conclusion and we had dealt with all of the “big bads” left over from the Warcraft RTS lineage. I know I struggled with Cataclysm but was never entirely certain WHY I struggled with it so hard. It was an expansion of changing the base world and lacked the big adventure aspect of the other expansions of going someplace we had never gone before. More than that however it featured a central story arc that I did not care about in the least. I’ve never much cared about the Dragon storyline and Deathwing just seemed like a convenient reason to revamp some of the older zones that were showing age. Arthas and Illidan were what kept moving me forward into new content, and with them forcibly retired at the hands of the raiding players… it felt like I had reached the logical conclusion of the game.
I think we’ve reached this point at least with Marvel where the best stuff is happening on the smaller screens. Loki, Wandavision, Werewolf by Night, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and event the somewhat maligned Moon Knight are doing extremely interesting things. The movies just seem to lack the same spirit and creativity that is being played out in short-run series form on Disney Plus. I mean Star Wars has also suffered from this problem for quite a while where the Dave Filoni-verse represented the best and brightest of what was available for that setting, and the movies were hollow shells. Disney will always chase big box office gold, but I think maybe that era is over. I find myself enjoying the more focused and personal stories of the series. For a while in the Marvel films I have been waiting for another conflict to erupt that feels as good as the sequence that ultimately ended with End Game, but I am no longer certain it is coming. I think maybe that was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and now that it is concluded the entire concept of what a “Marvel Movie” is needs to change. I’ve seen a growing dissatisfaction on social media for awhile surrounding the Marvel releases, so I am pretty certain I am not alone in thinking the original focus of the films is finished. I am not sad that I watched either the second Black Panther film of Quantumania, but neither made me necessarily excited for what is to come. I am sure I will keep watching these films in the future when they come to streaming media, but I think I am done with the “going to the theater” phase of the Marvel cinematic experience. I am way more excited about what is happening on the small screen than anything I know coming to the big one. The post Magic Blue Smoke appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Shovels and Shoveltusks

Shovels and Shoveltusks

I declared Thursday and Friday to be part of the weekend last week and decided to take myself four days off from the blog and one week off from the podcast.  I feel super chill going into what is likely going to be an exceedingly stressful week so I think it was probably a good call.  Apart of having to help my folks move some furniture yesterday, I mostly had a pretty chill thanksgiving.  Both Friday and Saturday my wife and I attempted to avoid the world, and the only shopping we really did was online apart from a mad dash out to Target around 9 pm on Friday.  At that point the store was largely sane and wasn’t that much different than a normal trip on any other night.  Throughout all of this I have found myself forsaking my normal checking of Pokemon Go in favor of the relatively newly released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp.  First off I have to admit I have never played an animal crossing game before so I didn’t have much of a cultural frame of reference going into this.  The experience instead reminds me a lot of a mix between the former web based casual MMO Glitch and some flavors of Stardew Valley.  Whatever you end up calling it the game is extremely charming and at this point I am level 16 and have a bunch of the animals at my campsite…  enough that the last three or four gave me a messaging saying there was no room.  Unfortunately I have no clue how you actually determine which ones are at your camp and which ones are not…  but for the moment I am rolling with it.

Shovels and Shoveltusks

I’ve also seemingly hit whatever the friend cap is because when I try and add anyone it says that combined between my friends list and the few outstanding requests I have run out of room.  I have no clue what this cap actually is…  I estimated 200 the other day but I am guessing in truth it is closer to 100.  The game is maybe bad at messaging some things but I am largely limping along without doing much in the way of research.  There is a quarry mini-game that requires you to get help from five of your friends, and I wish they messaged when my friends were needing help a little better.  For example if you look at the middle section of the above screenshot you will see a shovel icon out to the side of Kelsey’s name.  I wish there was a way to sort these to the top of the list because they are really the ones I am most interested in given I like helping other players, because you appear to get some sort of cut of their profits.  After that you attempt to guess which rocks have the most profitable stones…  gold nuggets seem to be the best.  I still very much feel like I don’t fully grasp a lot of things…  like how the hell to make large quantities of Bells that Animal Crossing currency.  Right now I have a 30,000 bells loan with the auto place and have never really gotten close to paying it off.  Thankfully they don’t seem to be sending anyone to break my kneecaps because of it though, and they still allowed me to customize my RV regardless of having the loan out.  I feel like maybe they don’t have the best business model.  Regardless if you have not been playing this you should probably check it out because it definitely seems to be addictive as hell given the wide variety of friends that seem to be playing it on a regular basis.

Shovels and Shoveltusks

I made a bunch of progress in Destiny 2 but I am likely going to wait until tomorrow to talk about that.  Instead I wanted to talk a bit about the other game I played over the break…  World of Warcraft.  I am still working on my tiny Orc Warrior that is getting less and less tiny as each week goes by.  At this point I have completed the Cataclysm content and am on the airship just about to start the invasion of Pandaria.  This is something I have never actually done on the horde side given my last several characters I leveled were abusing the shit out of the pre-legion launch invasions.  I’ve also not spent much time playing through Warlords of Draenor as a Horde character, so that should be interesting as well.  Similarly I have never seen Legion as the Horde…  all things I am interested in experiencing first hand.  The biggest shock for me is just how fast Cataclysm managed to go given that I started in on Vashj’ir Saturday night and dinged level 85 well before finishing the final section of it Sunday evening.  I realize that zone is in theory about the same size as two other zones combined…  but I did not expect to be getting quite that much experience from it.  Granted I am fully geared out in level 100 heirlooms (minus the rings because I don’t have the patience for that nonsense), but did not partake of any of the experience boosting options.  The mission of the day however is to try and figure out how to get a Pandaria flying book…  because I do not want to return to land based leveling if I can help it.

Tinfoil Hats and Legion

Nostalgia is Strong

Once again this week I have not really consumed much media, so I don’t have enough material to really do one of my normal Saturday morning columns.  Additionally I am still mired in this nostalgic bomb that is World of Warcraft Legion information.  I’ve still managed to stay “clean” but I know at this point it is only a matter of time before I renew my World of Warcraft account, and at least take a “taste”.  As quietly as Alt seemed to think, yesterday information about the Legion Beta client started trickling out on the data mining sites, and I have to say there is a bunch of interesting information.  So this morning I thought I would talk a bit about some of the theories I have running around in my brain.  Firstly there seems to be a much more heavy Vrykul theme than I originally thought.  I realize that one of the islands we will be visiting is essentially run by the Vrykul, and since they have more or less lost their connection to the Lich King, I am assuming we will not longer have the Valkyr resurrecting them and creating undead versions.

Much of the armor we have seen datamined has that same feel, which only serves to damage my calm all the more.  This expansion is starting to seem like an amalgam of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King which pretty much represent the pinnacle of my enjoyment of the game.  I feel like this is absolutely what they had intended, and then when you combine actually letting us venture into the Nightmare…  they are essentially throwing everything at the screen and hoping that we love whatever it is that they come up with.  There are so many warning klaxons going off in my head telling me that the end result will never live up to the hype.  The problem is there is a hyper kid in my head on a sugar rush telling me how awesome it COULD be…  and is slowly winning out.  Basically the adult in me is losing and I am finding myself paying closer and closer attention to Legion beta information.  More than anything I am just hoping they give me a Death Knight that is fun to play again.

King Anduin

Tinfoil Hats and Legion

I’ve said before that in the Legion trailer, I thought we would be witnessing the death of Varian Wrynn because for a few moments… you think exactly that is going to happen.  That is not in fact how the trailer ends up…  but as I was preparing for it… it started me thinking that I believe over the last several expansions Blizzard has been preparing us for this.  Bit by bit they have been grooming Anduin to take the throne, and in the datamined information we can see that once again he is getting a significant upgrade in model.  Similarly we see Anduin not Varian as one of the avatars we the players get to play.  I think it is pretty much an inevitability that something will happen to Varian and cause Anduin to take the throne, bringing with him a much more three dimensional and reasoned character than that of his father.  I like Varian just fine…  but he was always sold to us as “our” Thrall, but that promise has never really materialized.

Tinfoil Hats and Legion

The game as a whole is still to some extent dominated by the evolution of “Green Jesus”.  Maybe this expansion will be different, and maybe this expansion we will see Varian as something more than a dude with two badass swords and a penchant for war.  That has always been the problem with playing Alliance, it never felt like we had a really strong focus to rally around.  The horde have such a strong identity, and that reverberates with the players that love that faction.  The alliance on the other hand, has no shared struggle…  no central driving focus that they can rally behind.  We have a bunch of really interesting secondary characters, consistently rallied behind a significantly less interesting central character.  I had hoped that we would exit out of Warlords with Yrel, but all signs seemed to point to her staying on Draenor.  Then we have awesome characters like Genn Greymane that never actually got the promise of being a true and proper leader with their own city.  You can see that Genn also got a really nice model update, but my working theory is that this has something to do with one of the artifact weapon quests… and sadly not that we might be able to actually use Gilneas as a proper city.

Lava Man

Tinfoil Hats and Legion

I find it hilarious that after all of these years… the model is still called “Lava Man” in the back end, instead of Bolivar or even the Lich King.  This is obviously an updated version of the Lich King model, and I am wondering where exactly he will factor into the new content.  My theory is that this is probably related to the Artifact weapon quest chain, but then a part of me wonders…  if we are essentially creating an expansion with the best parts of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, are they going to set the Lich King up for a return as well?  We are after all seeing Illidan as part of this expansion, and it is a high likelihood that after all of these years Bolivar would lose his control over the power of the Lich King.  I always questioned the sanity of allowing Bolivar to hold this position… even though it seemed pretty badass at the time.  Surely eventually the power of the throne and the helm would overwhelm him… and he would in fact turn into a proper “new” Lich King.

With Legion could we be setting in a chain of events that would end up triggering a reboot of the Lich King content essentially?  Where the Scourge under the direction of the new Bolivar Lich King would once again ravage Azeroth?  There is part of me that doubts they would do something that blatant… but then again I never expected to see Illidan again.  There is of course another option.. we might end up fighting along side the scourge under the control of Bolivar as they serve as a nearly limitless army to take on the Burning Legion.  I guess it all depends on just how big this conflict gets before the end of the expansion.  The problem is… as I let all of these theories and ideas out of my head… the more I am wanting to log into World of Warcraft in its current state and play.  I know that the same game is there that I left several months ago, and that most of the things I am really interested in wont be here until Legion.  The stranglehold of nostalgia however is absolutely a thing.

Fighting Nostalgia

The Afterglow

During the midst of the BlizzCon festivities I tweeted the above statement… and at the time I thought this would be a brilliant idea.  BlizzCon brings up feelings in me at least that I didn’t even realize were still there about a game I have not been actively playing for six months.  So yeah… it seemed like if they would just automagically make it so everyone can log in and play during BlizzCon and the two weeks after… they would probably re-hook a lot of players on the game or at least get them to stick around for a few months.  The problem being…  two weeks is probably long enough to make someone come to their senses.  I phrase it like that because I am going through a bout of momentary insanity myself.  Every instinct in my body tells me that I really want to play some World of Warcraft, which is odd because nothing really seemed that amazing while the presentations were going on.  There is just something about the BlizzCon buzz that is real and tangible and makes you want to sift through your past characters and revisit old haunts that you had long forgotten.

I am having these desires to log in and run Icecrown Citadel or Naxxramas… or even Ulduar.  Basically this is 100% nostalgia attacking me and making me want to go experience what I considered to be the best era of the game.  I am fighting the urge with every fiber of my being because I know as soon as Tuesday happens… I will be devoting my life to Fallout… and thinking “Warcraft who?”.  I know I could log in and play sub level 20 characters, and I have considered that… but have not been certain if that would make the desire better or just worse.  The problem is… I don’t REALLY want to play World of Warcraft… I want to play the game circa 2009 when we were still in love with the Wrath of the Lich King patch cycle.  Some of the Legion content seems like it could be really cool, and I do hope with every fiber of my being I somehow find my way into Beta, but I know all that waits for me on the live game is the same stuff that lead me to finally cancel my account again.  Yes I am rationalizing the hell out of this because I am just trying to hold out until I am safely in a Vault Wednesday.

 Closer to Sleeper

Fighting Nostalgia

The above image was me yesterday morning while I wrapped up the AggroChat podcast and made my own blog post, waiting and hoping and praying to see a Warsat drop.  Part of the time I spent trying to make Destiny Event Tracker work… which it does… but it feels like there is a paragraph of explanation text that needs to go with it that simply does not exist.  It seems like this is a timer that shows when an event MAY spawn, and some of the spawn zones are not exactly active.  For example I really do think that the Warsat simply no longer drops in Skywatch because of all of the other events that are happening there now.  I waited that timer out for a significant amount of time and never saw one.  However once I switched over to checking the Mothyard on earth, aka the location in the above image… I quickly got a Warsat and was able to move on.  Similarly quickly I was able to get both the Mars and Moon Warsat drops which were pretty much accurate according to the timers listed above.  That only left the archives mission on Venus, which I know I MUST have done at some point….  but damned if I can remember doing it at any point in the past.  Maybe there is a special version if you are on the sleeper stimulant quest chain, but I do not remember something quite like that.

I have now finished powering up the Ikelos core, and have turned it in to the Gunsmith.  In theory tomorrow with the reset he should offer me a new quest to go do a 280 light version of the Saber-2 strike.  If I can cobble together a group for that, I should be able to loot the sleeper stimulant frame, which at least based on what I am reading will turn in at the Gunsmith for my finished 290 Sleeper Stimulant heavy pulse rifle.  This will be the first of the exotic weapon quests that I have really completed… not counting the one you get from the gunsmith at rank 4.  It definitely feels less arbitrary than the exotic bounties used to in year one.  In all of the bounties I completed I only ever got the bounty for the last word.  This at least gives me a ladder that I can climb, with more importantly a starting rung of that ladder that is clear….  well clear based on using external sources.  I am not sure how the hell people figured these things out the first time… it seems like pure madness since the game doesn’t really give you much information to go on.  I guess Bungie is accounting for the fact that the internet and YouTube is pretty much ubiquitous and someone somewhere would upload a video on how to do pretty much everything you can think of.  I still at some point need to get the Cult Ghost from Paradox so I can eventually get No Time to Explain.  Since my hunter is my Future War Cult devotee, I am thinking maybe I should try for it on them because at this point they should have all of the faction needed to complete the quest.