This morning I am having a minor case of the deads. I seem to have gotten whatever respiratory crud happens to be going around. Yesterday morning I was largely doing okay… but then as the day went on I felt worse and worse to the point of begging out of Rifftrax last night. Thankfully they were able to use my ticket for someone else, but it bums me out that I missed it. However from the sound of it the double feature… would have completely wrecked me. They apparently showed two complete movies rather than a short and a movie, and they didn’t actually leave the theater until 10:15 last night from a 7 pm show. Instead I stayed snuggled up on the couch and had some left over crockpot Tikka Masala for dinner. The bulk of the evening was spend winding my way through some horrible timewalking pugs. The piece of this that I realized is simply that folks do not seem to remember the Cataclysm content nearly as well as the other content… or at least Cata still requires you to do actual mechanics to keep from wiping. As a result I spend another large part of the night running back from wipes and trying to explain to people what went wrong. I should be tanking… but I wanted to shun all responsibility and just dps. The part I didn’t realize is that in my sub 810 form… I would also end up being the carry that did twice as much damage as the others in a lot of the groups. By the end of the night however I managed to pull my overall item level up to around 817, which now unlocked as of this morning some of the 830 world quest rewards. In theory that is going to be how I gear my Deathknight, but logging in… doing the Emissary chest and then knocking out any items that look useful.
The other activity last night was a vague attempt at watching The Game Awards. At some point this seems to have turned into a real awards show, when the first few years sorta felt like trying to make “fetch happen”. Somewhere along the line it actually became “a thing” and now has significant support from companies. It was largely something I was doing because I was bummed at missing RiffTrax and happened to see it scroll across my twitter. The part I was not expecting was the fact that apparently… folks are using this as another opportunity to announce and or show off upcoming games. There is a post in me somewhere about the never ending chain of promotional opportunities that game developers have right now. For years it was the CES and that was literally the only place we got information. Then E3 and Gamescom became significant players… and that was the moment when we found out literally everything that was to know about the upcoming games. Now we technically have five different PAX shows, and a plethora of other events like the Playstation Experience that is happening this weekend… and individual company based shows like FFXIV Fan Festival and Blizzcon. It seems like at any given point we are a week away from a potential cache of big announcements… and we as fans expect something important at each and every one of these. It is almost as though we are expecting executives at EA or Ubisoft to be prepparing their “Thanksgiving game”, or their “Presidents Day” game to announce at any moment. I don’t want to go on about this much longer… but I blame the constant deluge of things just on the horizon for constantly distracting us from the games we actually have installed and should be playing. Saying that… here are some things that distracted me from games I should be playing.
We finally got some really good footage of Andromeda that goes into more detail about how the actual game is going to function and play in its final version. Firstly I have to say I am super excited to see this because I like Mass Effect best when it is allowing me to play Star Trek Away Team. Of the previous games… my favorite is Mass Effect 2 because it was one the one that allowed me the most freedom to pop around the galaxy doing tiny interesting vignettes. The part I am hoping is that the moment to moment gameplay is going to be able to keep my attention. There was just something about the way that Inquisition performed that was a turn off… and then you take the fact that I am now forced to play a faction that I would rather be cheerfully slaughtering… and it was a recipe for a game that never quite clicked with me. Andromeda however feels like it is going to be something I can sink my teeth into… especially if it allows me to constantly be recruiting new and interesting people to join my core team. Also jump packs… are awesome.
Watching this trailer made me realize that no one has really done a good Monster Hunter style game for the PC platform. I am sure in the comments someone is going to point out one that I missed, but Monster Hunter fills this weird niche between traditional RPG and Diablo. Since this is being billed as an Action RPG I am hoping that maybe it falls along those lines. What I don’t want this to be is another asymmetric team versus monster game like Evolve. I have zero interest in that. Like if it is possible for interest to go into the negatives… then asymmetrical multiplayer falls into that category. It is being billed however as a Free to Play take on Monster Hunter by ex Riot and Bioware devs. On that billing alone… I am super interested.
If naked stranded on a beach crying Norman Reedus was not strange enough… we get another trailer for Death Stranding. Last I heard they had not actually even picked an engine yet, so I am finding it really hard to take anything I see on this game seriously at this point. That said I am really liking the direction of this trailer. I love the weird washed out post apocalyptic marsh thing going on… and I like the skele-zombie troopers thing and the Cthuloid tanks. This feels like it is going to be creepy in all the right ways and we need more Cthulhu in our lives… or at least ones that play on modern platforms after the frustration that was Dark Corners of the Earth recently. I am entranced and willing to throw money at the screen for this one, even if I don’t know specifically why I am. Guillermo del Toro makes the best monsters, and I was just commenting the other day about how badly I would love to see another Hellboy movie. Maybe this creations in this game can satiate the desire, because if nothing else it has me now following his twitter that is full of awesome monstrous stuff.
