August 2019 – Page 3

Familiar Frustration

August 23, 2019 by Belghast

I’ve been back playing World of Warcraft for roughly a week now, and have spent most of that time catching up on the storyline. One of the systematic problems I had with Battle For Azeroth’s design as an expansion is coming back to bite me in the butt however. During the entirety of Legion, weapon drops were not a thing because we were leaning upon the Artifact Weapon to always be relevant. As a melee this felt amazing since the most important slot we have is our weapon. You can drag along with some pretty shitty armor so long as you had a really good weapon. Unfortunately as we went into this expansion, it feels as though the game designers forgot they took away our artifacts. I remember at launch it feeling exceptionally difficult to get viable weapons while leveling and especially so once I capped out at level 120. The Demon Hunter was a little easier because I had the IWin button that was leatherworking being able to craft fist weapons for the first time this expansion. The challenge there is now that I am coming back and the item levels greatly increased… there is seemingly no updated version of these weapons.

I’ve been spending most of my time doing either Mechagon or Nazjatar, which are decently laid out but so big and dense that I find trouble doing both in a single night. I’ve managed to get both factions to Honored, and I am more or less exclusively grinding to unlock flight which happens at Revered. I did manage to get a lucky drop while in Nazjatar of a 415 fist weapon, and I managed to pick up a 380 off of a world quest, which is infuriatingly low given that my cumulative item level is 402 at the moment.

My chief frustration is that I feel like I don’t have an awful lot of great options to work towards. With Nazjatar they added in some really neat Benthic armor that you can work towards upgrading to I believe a maximum cap of 425. The problem there however is that once again… the designers forgot that we didn’t have artifact weapons and left those slots out of the system. There is currently a 400 sword available from a Dungeon World Quest, but I sat in queue for 30 minutes last night as a tank… and was not even seeing an estimate for how long the queue might last. I noticed that a Heroic Warfront option went into the game since I left so I gave it a shot last night thinking the 430 chest might spawn a weapon. Like the mythic dungeons however they left off a queue system which meant I had to rely on the group finder tool. I was rejected for seven different groups until I finally found one. I have no clue why I was rejected apart from maybe people disliking Demon Hunters? Once I got a group it went quickly enough and counted for both the normal mode and heroic mode weekly quest. I got a cloak, which is fine but I really needed that weapon. I noticed there was a decent looking fist weapon available through the PVP Conquest system, and it was enough to make me willing to throw myself at a system I have no interest in. I queued up for a few random battlegrounds, at which point I realized… there is no consolation prize worth chasing. If you win you get a meager around of conquest points… 40 to be exact out of the 500 that I need to get the weapon. If you lose however you get nothing at all but some honor points, which I am guessing won’t get me a weapon upgrade. This is largely a case of me not correctly reading the tooltip. I was willing to throw myself at a generally unfun experience 13 times to get a weapon. Even if a loss would have given half conquest… I probably would have been willing to throw myself at the wall 25 times to finish that out. I am not however willing to play enough battlegrounds to get good enough to start winning matches and instead will just deal with the fact that I have a 415 main weapon and a 380 offhand. I still have the raid to attempt… but the queues there were also atrocious with at one point reporting 50 minutes. I waded through the queue once to get a group that had finished the first two bosses… aka the ones that have a chance of dropping a weapon. I was a good sport and finished the raid. The thing is… I realize that I won’t care at all about any of this come Tuesday when I am playing a vastly different World of Warcraft. More than anything coming back has cemented my opinion that Battle for Azeroth was not a good expansion.

Game Music Composers

August 22, 2019 by Belghast

This week I have been looking for ways to remix the topic of “Developer Appreciation Week” seeing as I participated in the event several times when Scarybooster ran it and similarly when I adopted it as part of Blaugust. It is hard to find ground sometime that you have not already tread multiple times. However this morning I am going to focus on Video Game music specifically. I love soundtracks and as such I am going to highlight some of my favorite composers. With each I will highlight a specific track that more or less explains why I like them so much.

Bear McCreary

I have to admit I first took notice of Bear when the Defiance soundtrack was released. I love “wild west in outer space” genres, and the soundtrack he crafted seemed to fit it perfectly. I am extremely partial to the track Ninety Niners that I am embedded above. It really highlights the anachronism of twangy undertones with synth providing the driving beat.

Notable Video Game Soundtracks

Dark Void / Dark Void Zero
Defiance
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
God of War (2018 version)

Sarah Schachner

I first took note of Sarah’s work on the Assassin’s Creed Origins soundtrack and the way that she blended Arabian sounding themes into semi-electronica undertones to provide this auditory tapestry for my exploration of that big open world. However I really love her work on the Anthem soundtrack and I think it is highlighted with Valor the most, aka the Freelancer theme that plays as you are logging into the game. I love the Anthem soundtracks use of synthesized voice as an instrument. Notable Video Game Soundtracks

Assassin’s Creed Unity
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
Assassin’s Creed Origins
Anthem

Jesper Kyd

So Jesper Kyd has this insanely storied career doing Video Game music starting in 1990 and continuing through current projects like Borderlands 3. I have to admit I first took note of his work when playing State of Decay and the deep sense of remorse and melancholy invoked by the music. What better soundtrack for a broken world filled with the undead? A lot of times you latch onto music because of the memories you have associated with it. The above track does a great job of blending all of these different sounds into a theme song perfect for surviving the apocalypse.

Notable Video Game Soundtracks

State of Decay 1 and 2
Borderlands Series Contributions
Darksiders II
Assassins Creed I, II, Brotherhood, Revelations

Inon Xur

Inon Xur is another massive player on the Video Game music scene, but for me… my taking notice started with the Rift soundtrack. I LOVE the Defiant theme, because I was a steadfast player of that faction. I will absolutely rely on technology over magic and religion any day. This is another situation where I should probably just link to a Wiki page instead of calling out specific soundtracks, but in this case there are absolute favorites that I am going to highlight.

Notable Video Game Soundtracks

Fallout: New Vegas
Dragon Age: Origins
Rift
Fallout 4

Jeremy Soule

For me at least Jeremy Soule is synonymous with Elder Scrolls. Which is potentially is a double edged sword given that when someone is so identifiable with a specific thing, they often times have trouble breaking out of that mold. My personal favorite version of “the theme” comes from Elder Scrolls Online. He is just as equally recognizable however for Guild Wars fans and while I think it probably needed some tweaking I was pretty partial to his theme for the sadly never to be released Everquest Next. The first soundtrack I probably took note of him on however was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Notable Video Game Soundtracks

Elder Scrolls Series
Guild Wars Series
Dungeon Siege ½
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
Everquest Next/Landmark Theme

Masayoshi Soken

Soken as he is known by players of FInal Fantasy XIV is one of the most beautiful human beings on the planet. Firstly I love pretty much all of the music he has created for Final Fantasy XIV, but even more than that I love the spirit and excitement that he pours into it. Square releases these super awkward Bluray music discs that you have to connect through a Playstation 4 in order to pull MP3s from… yet I keep buying them over and over just to have an archival copy of his works. I like a lot of the music in FFXIV but my favorite theme will probably always be Garuda embedded above. He has also formed a “metal” band called The Primals where they focus on themes from the Primal fights like Garuda.

Notable Video Game Soundtracks

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
Final Fantasy XIV: The Far Edge of Fate
Final Fantasy XIV: Before the Fall
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward
Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood

In Closing

I could probably keep this up for awhile, but I have reached a point where I need to close things out and head to work. I am fairly passionate about Video Game music, and if you are as well then I highly suggest you check out the Battle Bards podcast as they focus entirely on awesome soundtracks to video games. Each show focuses on some theme and a ton of great music sounding it. Also the hosts are pretty great as well.

Hype, Cynicism, and Concern

August 21, 2019 by Belghast

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MspAKr8THf4

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8mC5GaDoyQ

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”.

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.