Well Folks, for better or worse we have finished the running of another Blaugust. This year things were mixed up significantly given that we technically ran the traditional Blaugust event back in April as “Blapril”. Instead of repeating things I made an attempt to create something different, and I think the jury is still out on how well it worked. The idea was simple in my mind, but the closer we got to actually starting it I realized just how complicated it actually was. I think the original intent was that we would be providing prompts for the community to write about, but instead it largely just turned into a thing were someone wrote about a prompt each day and we attempted to shine the light on that effort.
The dates were staggered so that for example on 8/30 I would technically be giving the prompt for 8/31. However that just confused everyone involved, and instead we shifted to something that carried off without a hitch. I am super proud of everyone who offered their support in this madness, and how reasonably well it worked. In the spirit of this adventure I figure it is a good time to do a final rundown of the prompts that were shared.
08/31/2020 – Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut – aka this post you are reading now
That is of course just a fraction of the posts that were created during this event, and you can see a large number of them using the Blaugust2020 Hashtag. The biggest complaint that I saw from anyone was that the prompts didn’t fit them that well. The challenge there however was that I tried to create 31 prompts that were fairly generic. Blaugust being what it is, it is a community that spans anyone one game… or even gaming in general and the hope was to try and make it as malleable as possible. The ultimate hope was that the writers would take that generic seed of a prompt and turn it into something that fit them personally. There were an awful lot that managed to do that which makes me exceptionally proud, and when I look at the list above it seems like a success to me.
Prompt 31
Horizon Zero Dawn – PC
So, I would say the event went off without a hitch minus one slight problem. Given that the prompts were offset by a day… I was originally supposed to be making this post on the 30th and not the 31st. That felt odd however and I made the executive decision to just sorta bump this one post a bit so it lines up better with the end of August. The prompts were legitimately assigned at random and the final prompt that landed on me is as follows.
What is your favorite thing to do in order to relax?Blaugust 2020 – Prompt 31
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you are probably going to realize that my answer is going to be gaming. There are a myriad of reasons why people play games. There are folks who really have a competitive spirit and love to play games for the challenge. There are folks who really enjoy the social aspect of gaming and do so as a way of hanging out with their friends. For me… when I am playing games at the purest I am playing them as an escape from the woes of the day to day grind. I love coming home and effectively melding into a game, shutting my brain off and just relying on pure muscle memory as I pilot the character like an extension of myself.
The Many Faces of Bel in various games
I think this is in part why Open World games and Massively Multiplayer Online Games have always been my kryptonite. They present to me this entire world for me to inhabit while I am playing it. I get to set my troubles aside on the shelf and be someone else for awhile, even if that someone else is just sorta the idealized version of me. The above image is something I commissioned from my friend AmmosArt for the 7th anniversary of this blog, and it shows some of my characters in various games… and there is a similarity between them. The character of “Belghast” has a certain appearance and I seek to create it as closely to that mold as the game will allow me. I think ultimately it is the me I sorta wish I was?
The Actual Bel with Josie
I am not this person however, and while I am largely okay with the bumbling oaf that I am in real life… there are times when it is really enjoyable to stop being me and become someone else for awhile. It is fun to become a person of action rather than to be forever locked in this overly cerebral state of indecision and self doubt. The most disturbing self realization that I had years ago… is that effectively “Belghast” is just Adrian Paul from the Highlander… with a beard. It is really weird the baggage that you carry along with you in your psyche, but I remember being super into that show as a teen.
My Blood Elf Paladin in World of Warcraft – PC
I think why I like games where you can grind your way in skill and level, is that they ultimately allow you to feel powerful. There is so much of my own life where I largely feel powerless over the actions swirling around me. I know this sounds weird given that I manage a fairly large team and have moved up in my career considerably since starting it in 1998. However no matter what my station in the working world is, there are just so many things that always feel out of my own control. I am always relying on the whims of someone else and never really feel like I have complete control of my own destiny. Instead I am just reacting to the things as they come and making the best possible decision I can at any given time.
Ghosts of Tsushima – Base PS4
In a game however, I am the ultimate arbiter of my fate. As I level up, gain new equipment I eventually reach a state near the end of the game where I am powerful and a force to be reckoned with. The thing is… it also has the side benefit of happening within a safe closed box that doesn’t impact others. So much of power is wielded in the real world by the selfish and the cruel in fulfillment of their twisted fantasies. Games allow me to safely act out upon those power fantasies while saving the day and being the big damned hero, rather than doing so in a more harmful manner. When it becomes too much, I can just log out or power down the console and move on with my very real life, all without any negative impact on others in the process.
Mass Effect Andromeda – PC
Games act as a sort of wish fulfillment. I wish I was a better person, and at times I wish I was off on grand adventures. I wish I was saving the galaxy or at least a village full of people from a rampaging horde of monsters. Games allow me to live all of these lives within the span of a couple dozen hours, and still log right back out and keep my normal life as well. There are times I think that games have been what have kept me sane, as I have dealt with all sorts of issues over the years. The truth is it is really my friends that I have made through gaming that have become the large extended family and support structure that I needed. I love my gaming family that puts up with me even when I am being a little boorish. Ultimately gaming is an escape for me, and I am very thankful that it gives me a relatively safe vehicle for relaxation.
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Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we are back after having a week off due to scheduling. Bel is super excited to talk about Amazon’s New World, which finally leaves NDA. He goes into a deep dive of his experiences so far with the assorted systems of the game. From there we have a reasonable segue into a discussion about Guild Wars 2 and getting used to the WvW pvp system. We also talk a bit about other games like Final Fantasy XIV and how it handles PVP. We have a random aside where Bel talks about how he tends to avoid using mounts in Open World games, and finally Ash talks about how he has come to peace with the Blue Mage in FFXIV.
This is just one of those weeks where I seem to be making exceptionally long winded posts. This morning I am in part reacting… to my reaction from Tuesday upon getting access to the New World Preview. One of the first things that I did was go through the chat settings and figure out how to effectively shut out the world. The preview had a significantly wider arrangement of people than the previous tests did, and as a result the quality of chat fell significantly. I decided for my own piece of mind that I would effectively mute everyone as a preemptive strike against toxicity.
We’ve spent a good deal of time lately talking about the toxicity of social media and the horrible things that people do to each other online. Nothing I am going to say today should discount the fact that people are often times completely awful. However this morning I had a thing happen that reminded me of what it felt like before the internet. I am not going to go into detail, largely because it is not my thing to share and didn’t directly involve me. However I very much remember the beforetimes and what it was like to live in a very small town in the middle of fly over country. I wrote about some of those experiences on Monday, from a specific point of view and I guess I am going to turn around and write about them from a different one today.
Growing up I knew I didn’t quite fit the mold that was provided before me. For starters I was significantly more sensitive than I knew I was probably supposed to be. I can’t remember explicit events, but I do remember getting my fair share of the “big boys don’t cry” nonsense. Still to this day it is awkward as fuck when I walk out of a movie theater after having been wrecked by the emotional conclusion of a movie and end up trying super hard to play it off like my eyes are watering because I have been yawning.
I also knew that my interests were not exactly drift compatible with that of many of my peers. I was lucky in that very late in my High School career I found a group of friends that I could be more myself around. I am super thankful having reconnected with my friend Jason over the last year or so, but I spent a lot of my childhood thinking something was wrong with me. My complete disinterest in sportsball and the fact that I was nowhere near as aggressive as I felt like I should be branded me as somewhat of an other. I was a fat kid (and am still a fat adult) and had way more breast tissue that I my peers making me feel a significant amount of shame any time I was pushed into a locker room situation.
Then there was the realization as things moved on that I wasn’t near as “Male” as I was expected to be. I was more or less raised by a series of strong women, and those are the people that I most identified with. I spent significantly more time with my Mom and Grandma than I did my Father and Grandfather. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my father and we get along great… I just wasn’t until scouting and realizing that he was a bit of an odd duck too that we really started to bond. Then there is the whole sexuality thing… of being MOSTLY “straight” but not quite and never really understanding exactly what that meant.
In the time before the internet, there was a lot of my life that I felt thoroughly alone. I graduated from a class of 60 students, and when you are in that situation your friendships mostly become the most compatible of what is available. I knew I wasn’t quite the way I was expected to be from a societal point of view, and because I was trying to fit in… and pushed those feels deep down to occasionally catastrophic result. I’ve struggled with “Dark Thoughts” as I call them for so many years that I am not even sure when it began, but I will say that it helped significantly to broaden my world.
As I roamed around the proto-interwebs I started to find folks that were a lot like myself. Even though at that point it was just a series of text based exchanges, it was like people were a truer version of themselves when online. When every interaction was anonymous… sure there was no reason to tell the truth, but there was also no reason not to. Growing up where I did, my world view was tragically small… and I got to meet vastly different sorts of folks in a very short period of time. I remember being introduced to two people… Semple and Dave.
Semple was sweet and outgoing and vibrant and Dave was her quiet and shy but still very sweet roommate. At that point I was into vampire roleplay on IRC, and Semple was one of my “Clan”. I’ve always been a community builder, and I built a little tribe among my Vampire “Childern”. Semple was struggling with something and I did my best to help her with whatever, but she seemed… for lack of a better word Haunted. There were times where she would not show up for days, and I would track Dave down to check on her. He would give me some excuse that she wasn’t feeling good, and that she would get back to me as soon as she could.
It wasn’t long before I started to understand the truth of the situation. Semple was the person that Dave wanted so desperately to be and was scared to death that if I ever found out the truth of the situation I would be mad. I’ve always sorta tried to take people at face value, because you find out a lot about a person by the way that they want you to see them. At this point in my life I knew nothing about Trans issues or identity, because I just didn’t have enough experience to understand it. I did however know that the person I had become friends with wasn’t a gender, and that it seemed like they were their most honest self when they were Semple.
There are a lot of people that I still wish I had contact with, from various eras of my life. Semple is one of them, because I hope she is thriving and happy. The thing with this era of the internet is that you didn’t really trade information. I guess this is why I get some cagey about the Facebook era, because in this time we were told to never share personal information because someone would come out of the internet and get you. So instead we shared our truth with our words, and rarely even traded emails. This is also likely why I seem to care way more about a persons “handle” than the real name behind it… and why it creeps me the fuck out when someone online calls me “Mark”.
Essentially, as much as I might vilify the internet and the toxicity it brings to our lives… I can’t say the beforetimes were better. Were it not for the internet and being able to find my own tribe of people and build my own support structure… I would not likely be here today. There were many times when the dark thoughts would have probably gotten the better of my will… were it not for the life long friends I have made throughout the years. Sure I am never going to sit across the table from most of them, but it doesn’t make them any less real or any less important.
This isn’t the sort of post that I am going to syndicate very widely. I go through a routine in the mornings of cross posting my blog… and when it is deeply personal like this I tend not to do that thing. This is a thing I wrote largely for myself and if you are a regular… I guess you get to follow along in that journey. I am not exactly share what this week has been about, because it seems like every day has been a significant post. Thanks for being out there even if we don’t interact much. I come to the internet to meet new people and understand points of view different than that of my own… and maybe just maybe make a good number of new friends along the way.
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Last night was a rough night. I got unceremoniously startled awake by our youngest cat at two in the morning and struggled to get back to sleep. While I have never been diagnosed with having a panic attack, I had what I can only deem as one. It felt like my heart was beating out of my chest even though both my blood pressure and heart rate were in the normal ranges. On top of that I could not get my mind to shut off.
This morning I have to go into work, which in the time of largely unchecked COVID-19 spread is always stressful given that there is no legitimate reason why I should need to do this thing other than for “face” with my management. On the way into work I have to drop our eldest cat at the vet for a glucose check, and if she so much as gets a hint of the cat carrier being around she freaks out and often pisses all over whoever is carrying her. Basically my brain went into overdrive running through the worst possible scenarios of how my morning was going to go… all the while ensuring that my day was going to be shit due to sleep deprivation.
A few weeks back I shared my concerns about how successful this console generation launch would ultimately be, and last night it seems some of those concerns were at least warranted. The reluctance of both Microsoft and Sony to reveal pricing and start pre-orders made me think that in both cases supplies for 2020 would be exceptionally limited if for no reason other than the constraints of ramping up production during a pandemic. Last night emails went out to Sony account holders, but I am not exactly sure what determined getting one versus the many folks who did not. I am wondering in my case if it was tied to PlayStation Plus access, because I have long considered that just part of the cost of owning a PlayStation console.
The email is not a preorder notice… but instead a notice that you can now register for the opportunity to preorder a console. The verbiage contained within the email and on the registration page goes a little something like this.
There will be a limited quantity of PS5 consoles available for pre-order, so we will be inviting some of our existing consumers to be one of the first to pre-order one from PlayStation.Sony Playstation 5 Pre-Order Registration Email
If you did not get one of the emails you can register through the page on PlayStation.com. I signed up because I had avoided purchasing a PlayStation 4 Pro in part because I was planning on upgrading to the 5 this year. I’ve squirreled away some cash for this purpose and have already prepared the spouse for this expense. In theory once the pre-orders open I will pop in and try and reserve a unit, but I do feel like I will be racing the bots.
When you submit your registration you are asked to provide your PlayStation ID, which is likely there to try and stop bots from scooping these all up to scalp for a premium. That said I would not be surprised if those same craigslist/ebay flippers are now instead creating a number of bogus PlayStation accounts, since you can do that without owning a console. It does however make me wonder if they are going to prioritize this system somehow, so that the first wave is to folks who have verified ownership of a PlayStation 4 and an active PlayStation Plus account or something along those lines. It will be interesting to see how this system plays out.
The majority of my game time last night was spent snuggling with cats on the sofa and playing some more New World. This time I started the game in a vastly different location than I did during my first test, and as a result getting to other territories seems considerably easier. As such I have popped over to the next settlement that the quest chain sent me to. However the quests I am being given are still sending me back across the border for various objectives.
I’ve leveled to 17 so far, and I believe the highest I had gotten in the previous test was somewhere in the vicinity of 25. My first time in the game I was picking abilities from all over the place and as a result I created something that felt very uneven to play. Now that I have focused largely on the defensive tree for sword and equipped a full set of heavy armor I feel considerably more sturdy than I was previously. As a result I seem to be able to take encounters that are significantly higher than my level, and have successfully defeated packs of 23ish mobs that aggro’d onto me while exploring.
Last night I found myself however switching things up and starting to level healing staff a bit. I found out that it seems weapon experience is gained by whatever weapon you last damaged the mob with. So I can whittle something down with Sword and Shield, and then swap quickly to Healing Staff and get that last hit in allowing that weapon to soak the benefit of the full experience. As a result I have poured on some very quick levels and at the very least now have that AOE pulse heal which comes in handy for recovering from a rough encounter.
One of the biggest frustrations that I have had so far in combat is really a two fold problem. Firstly I really hate how hard it can be to get a tag in on a mob when there are multiple people fighting it, as instead you end up registering hits on the players (and since I am not flagged it is effectively damage that just poofs). The second frustration is how seemingly random the aggro table seems to be on mobs. I would be interested to see how the formula actually works because the game seems to be fairly unacceptable to trains, aka where a large number of disengaging mobs chain onto a new target. I noticed this happen a few times in the previous test and I have seen it happen to me a few times here to a lesser extent.
All in all though, I am still really enjoying myself. As Bhagpuss said in his comment yesterday, if it released tomorrow I would likely happily play it in production while they stomp any residual bugs over time. I did not at all expect myself to enjoy the game in the way I have, and I am interested to see how it shapes as it nears release.
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consoles available for pre-order, so we will be inviting some of our existing consumers to be one of the first to pre-order one from PlayStation.Sony Playstation 5 Pre-Order Registration Email
