Most of last night I spent working in Final Fantasy XIV on the Main Story Quest. I am taking things rather slow and spent a good chunk of the night actually playing with my kitten Josie instead of rapidly going through the quest line. I am enjoying myself quite a bit and finding the story beats to be interesting. I have no clue how big of a story patch 5.1 is but I have a feeling I am nowhere near closed to the end of it. Then I still have 5.2 sitting in front of me, and I have been fervently avoiding reading much of anything on FFXIV to in theory avoid spoilers. I’m also enjoying what little combat I have done with the Samurai and in theory if I do come back for any extended period of time I will likely just be focusing on that job.
However that is not going to be the focus of this mornings post. Last week I talked about playing SWG Legends a bit because Tam has been back playing it seriously. I talked about how I was not exactly sure how big of a component nostalgia had for me when it comes to playing outdated games. While I have been thoroughly distracted as yesterdays post indicates, I also am not sure if I love Star Wars Galaxies. At the very least I do not love the game in the manner that Tam loves the game. I see in him a bit of myself, every time I tried to convince someone how amazing of a game Everquest II was if they would just give it a chance and forgive its rough edges. He looks at this game like I have looked at so many of my passion projects, and without that love and care behind the en-devour I am not sure if I can really latch onto it. What I see instead is a game that is grossly outdated and requires more of me than I am willing to give it other than at a purely casual level.
This however lead me down a path to explore games that I do have deep feelings about. Namely I have known for awhile that City of Heroes Homecoming existed, but have really made no attempts to engage with it. The process for installing the Everquest Emulators have made me gunshy about going down the road to trying out other similar projects. However I originally messed with the EQ Emulators in the mid 2000s and this is now 2020 and thankfully the projects have evolved. Thankfully in the case of COH you have two steps essentially the first being to sign up for a forum account and then create your game login here. Next create a directory on your hard drive that you want to store City of Heroes in, download the Tequila client and run it as administrator. This downloads the game from scratch and will serve as your patcher while playing.
It was not long at all before I was creating a brand new character and poking my way around Paragon City. The interface is a little kludgier than I remember it, but for the time it was absolutely revolutionary. I created a version of my favorite character from live, the Katana/Regen Scrapper and we will see if it is as broken as it was back then. If nothing else it should serve as a good vehicle for exploring the game since it has both decent damage output and solid survival. Nostalgia helps a lot because I was pretty happy to roam around and complete quests, even eventually remembering how to slot enhancements and all of that fun stuff. I barely got a start last night but I expect to be poking around over the next several days at least.
Since I was clearly not in my right mind… I also went through the process of getting set up to play Everquest 1999. I’ve started a Dark Elf Shadowknight and I plan on setting up a second login server account so I can create a Dark Elf Cleric to run with it. I plan on dual boxing a bit because I have honestly missed doing that. I could of course return to my duo of characters in EQ2 live, but part of me wants to see Everquest again in all its early 2000s glory since I have been poking my head around in the game that came after it. I mean I will be hated by most everyone as a Dark Elf, but I never really played that side of the house on live. The other option would have been to create a pair of Dwarves and I legitimately might do that as well to see my old stomping grounds of Butcherblock. I realize this is just further distractions but I am enjoying myself so I guess that is fine.
Last night I returned to Final Fantasy XIV or at least attempted to. I had not played much since the first or second week after the release of the Eden raid. If my math is right this would have been around the beginning of August, and after doing my traditional FFXIV thing of leveling my tank and a dps class I checked out in a massive way. I’ve more or less purposefully been holding off knowing that if I could come back with a large chunk of MSQ to consume I might be able to stick around long enough to get into the swing of things. As a result I did not return when 5.1 released and since last night was the launch of 5.2 I decided that was a reasonable time to start poking my head back into the game.
I did not make a ton of progress and more or less unlocked the first dungeon and ran it with a trust. I did not at all expect the Crystal Exarch to fill the tank role… but the fact that he was a Paladin makes some measure of sense as far as tank roles go. I am playing my Samurai figuring it will be easier to get back into the game if I am able to do so with limited responsibility. My biggest challenge with FFXIV has been the fact that the game expects everyone to be a DPS, and if that is the case I might as well just play an actual DPS. I am of the mindset that Tanks should be Tanks and Healers should be Healers and if they can throw the occasional damage dealing spell awesome… but FFXIV is a game that has devolved into a state where everyone is expected to have an optimized dps rotation. I can’t say if this trip back into FFXIV is going to stick or not but at a minimum I will probably gobble up the main story quest and we will play it by ear after that.
Also happening yesterday was the launch of a new in game Destiny 2 mini-cinematic showing an a confrontation between Osiris and Rasputin. I guess this means that unlike the rumors of maybe going back to the Prison of Elders we will once again be entangling ourselves in some manner with the Warmind. I am split in a bunch of different directions this week because it is probably the last Iron Banner of Season of the Dawn and I really would like to earn a set of the armor available in its 2.0 variant. It was my favorite of the Iron Banner armor sets and I am sure with the changing of the seasons it will be gone. I am also sitting at level 60 of 100 and would feel sad if I did not manage to grind out all of the season levels.
Then there is Wolcen which I am completely enamored with and want to play more of. I was super happy to find out that cosmetic choices are on a per slot level and not per gear, so if you swap gear your cosmetic choices stay put. The only thing that I have done so far is hide my helmet because quite honestly I usually hate helmets in video games. I’ve not made a ton of progress because of course last night I was distracted by Final Fantasy XIV, so add this to the list of games that are pulling me in different directions.
Finally at some point I really want to finish off Mars: War Logs and see where that story goes… so that is a 4th game to throw on the pile of things fighting for my attention. On top of all of this… something has been going around at work and causing people to drop like flies and yesterday my direct boss as knocked out of commission by it. Last night I did not feel amazing and this morning I am feeling completely awful, so I am wondering if I am about to go on my own roller coaster ride of illness. Basically I have gone from being super single threaded on single player games… to being distracted constantly by the allure of multiplayer games that I am playing in a single player manner. I feel like for the entirety of this decade I have been living in this state of having way too much that I want to be playing.
There are times that I feel like I need to warn my readers that they are about to go on a weird ride. This morning is one of those times because I have been in a strange head-space of late. Anytime I start plumbing the depths of my psyche you know something strange is going to come welling up from below. I’ve probably even written about this topic before, but when you have as many posts as I have it is bound to happen. Music used to be of the utmost importance to me and from the moment I got my first Walkman around 1983 until sometime circa 2008 I had music going almost 24/7.
I lived my life to my own personal soundtrack made up of whatever I happened to be listening to at the time. This was often times blaring out of a “boom box” into whatever room I happened to be in. I spent copious ours listening to music and drawing and at the same time thinking about all sorts of things. However at some point over the years I lost both of those things. I know exactly the moment when I stopped doing much in the way of artwork. It was our first year out of college and I had begrudgingly agreed to paint a mural in the activity center. We were supposed to be the only people in that area for the next two weekends and I decided to leave my paints, brushes and materials locked up under the bar area. When I came back a few days later it was all gone and I never quite recovered from the loss and pretty much shut down artistically.
The music thing however was more subtle. I don’t know exactly when I stopped actively listening to music but it is sometime over the last decade. I am not sure if I traded podcasts and youtube videos for music, or if I just stopped listening for other reasons. I do know that I am still pretty much constantly wearing headphones while seated at the computer, but often times there is nothing playing through them and I just sorta find the subtle pressure on either side of my head comforting. I was an early adopter of the MP3 and I remember in college setting up a script to rip new CDs I had bought to MP3 over night. However at some point I stopped caring about my archives of that as well and I just started streaming music first through Pandora and eventually through Google Music and now Amazon Music.
The problem with Google and Amazon is that they are not exactly great engines for showing me new things. I tend to go there when I want to listen to a specific song or album, whereas with Pandora I was constantly experiencing music that was effectively “new to me”. The algorithm that tried to gauge taste actually did a fairly good job of predicting the sort of music that I would normally want to listen to. I spent several years fine tuning it and even had a premium subscription back when those were like $20/30 a year instead of the monthly fee that exists now. I wonder if returning to Pandora would make the whole experience feel fresh again rather than just something I do when I specifically want to hear a song, because right now when I have one of those random moments I tend to just look something up on YouTube instead of a proper streaming service.
I know that sometime within the last ten years I started to struggle with listening to music with words while working on other things. More specifically I had trouble coding while listening to music with lyrics, and I ventured out into movie and video game soundtracks in a big way. The Destiny Soundtrack and the Tron Legacy Soundtrack have become my go to music for when I need to buckle down and concentrate on something. The only problem with that however is that soundtracks don’t make me think in quite the same way that lyrical music used to. While doodling away in my room I would explore the structure of songs and try and dissect all of the possible meanings that they could have. There are so many words and phrases that I use today that I first heard and stole from a song.
I grew up in the country without a steady flow of options when it came to music. So when someone got something new we used to make copies and pass it around and each time I got my hands on new music it was like a beam of light shining down on my otherwise dull existence. The same was true with movies and video games because they were all equally uncommon, and it wasn’t until I could drive that I regularly had access to get a fresh supply of those things. I was stuck in a small town that during my High School years didn’t even have a Walmart because it had closed during a consolidation when the Super Center opened one town over. So as a result things that are probably not important to anyone else are important to me, because when I did buy an album… I tended to listen to it until I had the transitions between songs memorized. Still to this day there are times when I hear a song and my brain expectantly waits after it finishes for the next song on the album to start playing.
The problem is… I am not quite sure how to get back to the place where music held the important role in my life that it once did. I’m almost not quite certain how to get over the mental block that has kept me from doing actual artwork for the last two decades. There are times when you have lost something and you are not even sure how it happened. I realize this has been a weird and lament filled post but it is what has been thrashing around in my brain. One of the things about daily blogging is that occasionally I feel like I have to be honest with my readers and just let these odd posts make their way onto the page. Instead of images I am going to perforate this post with some songs that have been kicking around in my head of late.
Wolcen had what can only be described as a rough launch week. This is a game that has been in early access for roughly two years, but was also in what I would term as a “very alpha” state for much of that time period. Throughout the early access period it had a peak concurrency in the ballpark of 1000 players. Immediately after launching on Thursday this shot up rapidly to a peak concurrency in the range of 65,000 players and Steam Spy now lists 67,375 as the current peak. There is a massive difference between balancing a server for 1000 connections and balancing one for over 60,000 connections and as a result not surprisingly the game cratered hard under the crush of this traffic.
Gamers as the masters of hyperbole as we are, jumped straight to 11 and started thrashing Wolcen in every possible venue. For me as a grizzled veteran of bad game launches sat back realizing that they were dealing with “some shit” right now and the ship would right itself in time. The only place where they failed in my eyes is that they should have communicated the depth of the problem immediately. Yesterday morning the above message showed up on the steam forums explaining what was going on and what they were trying to do in order to fix it. I probably would have lead with this message on Friday, but that is also coming from someone with management experience in situations where projects have gone south quickly. The instinct is to batten down the hatches and rush into “fix all the things” mode, but the real first step should be formulating a message to get out to your customers.
There is also a scale thing going on here with this launch and my reaction to it. When you have someone like a Blizzard, UbiSoft or Electronic Arts and they botch the launch of a game, I have way less forgiveness in my heart because “they should know better”. They are AAA publishers that have been through more than one bit “massively multiplayer” launch and also have the resources that they can bring into play in order to rapidly scale their solution. The eponymous Wolcen Studio at least at the time of writing their “meet the team” piece is a group of 13 people working out of what looks like a house. My reaction as such is commensurate to the staggering effort it is for a first time team to publish a game like this and while they could potentially learn from the sidelines, the best laid plans are discarded when your servers suddenly have a 6500% increase in traffic.
The silver lining to all of this however is that unlike most ARPGs there is a way to play the game offline without needing to care about the servers burning down around the team. As such I spent a good chunk of the weekend running around with a brand new character on the offline mode and catching up to where I was in the progress in the online mode. This is my biggest complaint right now is the inability to flip characters between these two modes. I mean I get it from a “wanting to stop cheating” standpoint, but especially in the eyes of the bad launch we are dealing with it becomes frustrating to try and keep two different characters in sync with each other. Between the various late stage beta game-play and these multiple characters I have created I more or less determined what sort of build I wanted to go with.
I’ve been focused on a tanky build with high block and resistance and then I essentially leap into battle which gives me some initial rage and then spin to win. Bladestorm is specked out so that it doesn’t cost that much rage and each time I hit something I gain rage back allowing me to keep this reaction going for quite some time. I’ve also poured some points into Rage Conservation allowing me to take a bit of time to move between packs of mobs and also took the ability that allows me to gain rage while being hit. All combined allows me to spin around the battlefield in relative safety while chewing up encounters. I am sure I could probably make a more effective version of this build if I focused on bruiser gear and maybe dual wielded onehanders… but I am me and I have a sword and shield fetish.
Last night I managed to connect with Grace who has also been playing this when the servers came back online and were more or less stable. There seems to be a hefty group xp bonus and a bit of a catch up curve because when we started playing there were 3 levels difference between us and by the end of the night we were dinging within a few minutes of each other sitting at the same level. The teleport to friend system seems to work more or less like you would expect from Diablo 3. I am not sure what the restrictions on trade are but I seemed to be able to trade pretty much anything that I got as a drop as I was funneling Grace some spells that might be useful for her “Demon Hunter” build. The biggest thing we both noticed was how much loot the game seemed to drop in group mode because we were constantly running back to town to sell. I would love to see some sort of a sell all button to speed this process up.
In the grand scheme of things I am still very happy with this game and it is effectively the thing that I have wanted for quite some time. Wolcen is a game that takes the best bits of Diablo 3 and combines them with the best bits of Path of Exile, creating a hybrid that is more enjoyable at times than either of its predecessors. Time will tell if they can grow the game into something truly amazing, and I have yet to see what the end game is like. My hope is that all of the hyperbole surrounding this game will fade as people actually get access in order to play it. Wolcen is absolutely worth picking up especially for its sub $60 price tag. Here is hoping that they can nurture the game for the long run and keep making tweaks and additions in order to keep the content fresh.
