Hype, Cynicism, and Concern

First up this morning I am going to talk a bit about Bungie account linking and the Battle.net to Steam transfer process. Largely I am going through the motions here just in case someone out there has not been following the news related to Destiny 2 for some time. Bungie is divorcing Activision and part of the terms of the divorce is that they will be moving the PC version of Destiny 2 away from Activision Blizzard owned Battle.net. The new partner for account information will be Steam, a thing we all pretty much already have. However the data from Battle.net needs to be linked up and copied to your Steam account. As a result yesterday they opened up the process for doing this. I tweeted out the link yesterday but you need to go to Bungie.net and use the PC Move tool. Effectively this will walk you through the process of logging into a Battle.net account, verifying your characters and such that are owned by that account, logging in a Steam account, and finally verifying that everything is appearing on the Steam entitlement screen. It took me a few minutes and now Steam shows up in the list of accounts that I have linked. The truth is I am largely okay with this move because the integration with Battle.net never worked quite as smoothly as I would have liked it to.

Next up in the “things I think are cool” department. With Gamescom comes a bunch of new trailers, and this time we have one for Shadowkeep showing off the finisher moves. This is something new going into Destiny 2 and seem to be similar to the finishing moves in Doom 2016. Essentially when an enemy gets low enough you can perform a special melee attack with its own unique animation and punch/kick/whatever the monster to death. The bad bit is that the cosmetic versions of these will be Eververse exclusive, but the mods you can associate with them that do things like spawn heavy ammo will be gained through gameplay.

Next up we got a trailer for the first post-Shadowkeep Season, this time seemingly focused on the Vex and the Black Garden. I still think the Vex are one of the cooler enemies we fight, and I’ve always thought it cool that the radiolarian fluid that you see come out of them when you kill one is a sentient hive being of a sort. There are some rumors floating around as to why we are going back to the Black Garden, but in truth I don’t really care. I am just happy to see Bungie slowly clawing back locations that only appeared in Destiny 1 and putting them in Destiny 2. Next step… I want to see them simply recreate the Destiny 1 experience inside of Destiny 2 and rebrand the whole thing to simply being “Destiny”.

Can we just admit to ourselves at least that nothing is anywhere as exciting as a video game hype person seems to make it out to be?

— Belghast Ten Years of Nonsense (@belghast) August 19, 2019

The other day I posted what was largely a throwaway tweet while watching part of the Gamescom Xbox show. It featured some of the most hyperbolic pitch folks I have ever seen, that were fake levels of excitement about every little thing that was being announced. That level of forced hype really is a turn off, which is sad because once I was able to get past that there were a bunch of cool things that they talked about. So I find myself wondering… how did I get into this state where I almost feel allergic to hype? E3 2019 was largely a disappointment, and what I have seen from Gamescom could be thrown in a similar category.

Is it just that I am gunshy from being burned so many times? I mean I poured my heart in soul into Anthem and largely found a really great game… but one that stopped being great after you burned through the initial story-line. That said I think the Anthem reveal at E3 several years back was the last time I was fully on board with a staged demo selling me on the notion of what the game might be like. It might just be that I have reached a point where I am skeptical about anything that is being announced, because while I lead this off with talk about Destiny 2 and the fact that it is in a pretty great place… it has taken them three years of ups and downs to get to that place. I think a whole other side of this is just the sheer concern of not knowing where I will find the time to play even half of the things that I am vaguely interested in. I already feel like I have a crushing back log pushing down on me of games that I really feel like I should be playing for various reasons. Then just looking ahead I have no clue how I am going to navigate all of the release dates. I just assembled this quick list which is in no way complete… but represents some of the bullet points on my radar for the rest of 2019.

• World of Warcraft Classic – August 27th
• Monster Hunter World Iceborne – September 6th
• Borderlands 3 – September 13th
• Destiny 2 Shadowkeep / Season of the Undying – October 1st
• The Outer Worlds – October 25th
• Death Stranding – November 8th
• Jedi Fallen Order – November 15th
• Pokemon Sword and Shield November 15th
• Doom Eternal – November 22nd

There is a part of me that wonders if my challenge getting hyped about things coming down the pipe is a defense mechanism seeing as I know that I don’t have time to play all of the things I already want to play, and then for the rest of the year at a minimum of every other week something new is being released that I also really want to play. I have no clue how I am going to juggle all of this, and as a result I am just wondering if my brain is throwing up blinders and screaming at me that enough is enough. The level of excitement that I feel however seems to be hampered as well. Like yesterday I wrote about my love of Black Isle/Obsidian and everything I have seen about The Other Worlds seems like a return to the best of what I love from them… Fallout New Vegas. However I am finding it really challenging to muster more than a mild sense of excitement about it. My brain is stuck in a mode where I am trying to figure out how I will juggle my schedule to find the time to really devote a weekend or two to exploring it. Maybe I am just broken. Whatever the case though I really don’t want my ramblings to harsh the excitement someone else is feeling about it. My twitter comment really was meant as a sort of throwaway reaction, but maybe I need to watch those more closely. I don’t want to come off as a bitter old man, but maybe on some level that is what I am? It sucks. I want to feel child like joy when I watch a games presentation again. I miss having E3 or BlizzCon or any other major show to feel like Christmas morning.