One of my many secrets to surviving the time of pandemic has been spending time in World of Warcraft. No matter how long I am away from the game, coming back to it always feels like coming home. We shall not look at the /played time for all of my characters because it would probably frighten me, but needless to say I have spent many an hour poking around in this game since it launched in November of 2004. I go through these periods where I attempt to be super serious about content, but my happiest times are always when I am just poking around and doing casual stuff on my army of characters. I find leveling to be exceptionally calming and before the pandemic I had two characters at 120, and now I have 1 Alliance side and 10 Horde side. Leveling is just something that gives me an opportunity to turn my brain off and relax, and stop worrying about everything that is going on and every possible interaction that I might encounter.
Most recently I had been working on my Mag’har Orc Shaman and I had a really fun time leveling it. Always in the past I have focused entirely on melee characters and as a result I have always leveled Shaman as Enhancement. This time around I decided to mix things up and leveled from the very beginning all the way to 120 as Elemental. I have to say Elemental is exceptionally fun with the way the play style factors around various procs. I think what I enjoyed the most is the fact that I didn’t feel squishy in the same way that I attribute to casters in general. I usually had time to heal myself back up when I was taking damage, or hit one of my “oh shit” buttons like Earth Elemental to take the heat off of me for awhile. The only negative is it felt a little weak in the AOE department, and shocks were really the only viable means of tagging mobs especially when it came to world quests. I finished the Shaman on Friday and then turned around and immediately started working on the next character in sequence.
That would be my Vulpera Rogue, because it just seemed to fit given they are a small and tricksy race to start with. I am leveling Outlaw because I still don’t like daggers at all, and am having a great time of it. Tam would be proud as I use the various rogue tricks to whittle my way through camps of mobs. I’ve also learned the joys of Sap and Pick Pocket used in sequence. I am not sure if I have ever leveled all the way through Stranglethorn Vale since it was changed drastically in cataclysm, so I am absolutely enjoying that as well. I should ding 60 before I finish the area and at that point I will likely jump over to Outlands. I’ve recently developed a taste for the Burning Crusade content and it seems more efficient than running through Wrath of the Lich King for that level block.
Now I realize that all of this is going to be meaningless shortly when the pre-patch lands. I don’t expect to make it all of the way to 120 on the Rogue before that happens, which means I will likely be leveling my last character under the level squish. The only remaining character I have horde side is my Nightborne Shadow Priest, and it is currently wearing heirlooms in Ashenvale. I was not entirely certain how well I would do at leveling a pure caster, but at this point I have leveled the Elemental Shaman and the Warlock, so maybe just maybe shadow will feel natural after those. At least in the case of Shadow Priest I still have a bunch of ways to bring my health back up… which is not a thing you have on a Mage which is why I ultimately used my boost on that character.
Other than that I have been running Coren Direbrew each day on my army of alts, mostly just to farm a few trinkets and that I guess it feels like the thing to be doing. I really enjoy World of Warcraft when we are in these in between times and there is zero pressure to be leveling or gearing. My hope as is always the case is to go into this expansion without feeling the need to chase other players in level or in gearing. However I also know that once I get in the thick of things that the old instincts will kick in and I will apply pressure to myself to rapidly move through the levels and be “ready” for things I am not likely going to do. Right now my plans are to do some Mythic+ key pushing, but for that I need to figure out a viable group. Right now we have my Paladin and Grace’s Monk, so I need to sort out who else we might have access to. I am targeting a EST/CST friendly time frame so apologies to my West Coast friends, but yall need to operate way the fuck too late for my old ass. Hopefully I can make something happen, but for now I am happy leveling my alts.
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Sometimes on AggroChat we inadvertently sell each other on the games we are playing. On this weekend’s show Tam threw a topic on the trello that I couldn’t pass up, because initially I thought he just wanted to talk about generic fantasy tropes. However apparently it was instead a topic about the Steam recommendation system sending him in the direction of a game named Swords ‘N Magic and Stuff, which exudes a significant amount of charm. I checked it out during the show and it reminded more than a little bit of Cube World, which is a pretty crunchy voxel exploration game. What ultimately made me pick the game up, is knowing that Tam very much does not go in for the Minecraftian style graphical thing and if he was interested them probably it was worth noting.
First points scored for the game is that it has a really interesting character creation system. The characters themselves are extremely stylized but at the same time are capable of expressive characteristics. Right now you have Human, Dryad, Faun, Moon Elf and Sun Orc to choose from with their own color variations available. In practice what this really meant to me was general human, woodgrain character, has ram horns, can be purple and has tusks and horns. I ended up gravitating towards the Orc and made one with rusty red skin and dark green hair and beard. The game scores big props with me for being entirely genderless so you have access to all the same bits and can fiddle with them until you get something that makes you happy. I even got the over the eye scar thing that I seem to love so much and always choose when it is an option as well as a rather high quality braided beard.
The game starts you off on a ship heading to an island in order to seek your fortune. Ships make for an excellent starting point, given that you are in a relatively confined place which makes for easy to follow tutorials. You go through the paces of having the simple interactions of the game explained a bit, and are walked through an early example of a quest where you fetch something that another character can’t get to. Once you have looted anything that isn’t nailed down, you can proceed up on the deck of the ship where you have arrived at the island in question. The captain wants to talk to you about the matter of settling up for your journey, and introduces you to the first few quests which involve going and procuring some dizzy juice for him.
Questing seems to be very much of the “If you give a mouse a cookie variety”, as so far other than a quest to find some glasses they all appear to branch out significantly. In order to get the Dizzy Juice, the tavern keeper asks you to clear out a cave and in order to get into the cave the person standing guard asks you to fetch a mug from inside. Inside the cave there are three crabs and a mug that you can loot, which then allows you to retrace your steps back to the guy who loaned you his key, and back to the tavern keeper who wanted you to clear the cave out… and then back to the captain who gives you a second quest to reserve a room at the inn. As I spread out through the island, many of these quests involved doing sub quests to retrieve something else, which in itself often requires you to get something in order to do it. For example I am being asked to get a candle for a picnic, and in order to get that I need to get some honey combs for the candlemaker… which it seems requires me to have purchased a sling shot to knock them down.
The combat system is fairly straight forward, but one that it very much feels like the deck is stacked against you. Every thing I have encountered so far deals significantly more damage than I am capable of. Additionally there is no health regeneration, so you need to carry with you a fairly ample supply of healing potions which I am hoping at some point I will be able to learn how to craft. Using a weapon increases your skill in that weapon, which seems to increase your likelihood for critical strikes. There is a crafting system that I have not interacted with much, but it allows for you to upgrade your weapons if you gather the resources to do so. Right now I have largely focused on a sword and shield because these were the first weapons that I got access to.
While combat seems a bit uneven at times, one huge boon is the fact that death seems to largely be meaningless. When you die you go into a spirit world similar to that of World of Warcraft, but where it varies greatly is that a timer starts ticking down. When it completes you will be summoned back to life at the nearest shrine, which in the case of early exploration seems to be right near the docks in town. While you are in the spirit world with the timer ticking down you can free explore and scope out dangerous areas, which is pretty cool. The initial island itself seems fairly small, but I did notice there was a ferry that I am guessing will take you to other islands. In some ways the game reminds me of a more combat focused “The Touryst”, because it has a similarly interesting lighting engine.
At this point I have not really spent much time in the game, but I don’t want to dig in too deeply given that it is a pretty fresh early access title. I want to get together with Tam and try out the multiplayer, so we can see how exactly that works. This was the product of a fairly successful kickstarter, and looking at the various stretch goals it seems like there is going to be a lot of interesting things added in over time. That said there already is a lot here, given that there appears to be a fully fleshed out cosmetic system and from the looks of it maybe even a housing system. I find I really like the art style, and once I get a hang of the combat I think that will become a little more fair feeling. I think mostly it is just getting used to bringing up your shield at the exact moment of the attack rather than my usual of holding the shield in front of me… waiting for an attack and then striking.
Right now the game is roughly $20 on Steam, but like I said before is in early access so your mileage may vary depending on your proclivity for early access titles. Right now I plan on poking my head into the game off and on to continue to exploring it in small doses. I am intrigued by what is there enough to keep playing, but I do hope that a more functional map is in the works. Right now you can bring up a sketch of the island but you can’t seem to scroll in or anything. As is usually my case I will likely write again in the future about my adventures, especially if I can find a time when Tam and I can get in and kick the tires for the multiplayer functionality.
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Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Ring Fit Adventure released just shy of a year ago at this point, and it is only now finally reliably available in stores. As a result of several of us finally getting our hands on it we talk a little bit about the experience of using it. From there we talk about the PS5 Price Reveal and pre-order debacle. This moves into discussing the RTX 3080 launch as well and the application of bots from Bounce Alerts snagging most of the stock in both cases. Hades from Supergiant games has finally officially released and we are talking about the game that was described by Tam as an “Escape Room”. From there Tam talks about finding gold in the Steam suggestion queue in Swords n Magic n Stuff. Finally we talk a bit more about Final Fantasy XVI and speculate on when we might actually get to see it.
There are a couple different versions of this “quiz” floating around social media. I saw the very truncated version on the left first and later a more complete version circulated on the right. However it got me thinking about consoles and the generations that they belong to. Essentially for a long time now I have heard people refer to a specific console as being part of the third, the seventh , or even now that we are entering the ninth generation. I wanted to know more about this and as a result it sent me down a rabbit hole that I am now sharing with you. Of course you can just read this handy wikipedia page I found in my travels and be done with it, but I figure if you have made it this far into the post you are probably going to continue down to the end.
Generation One – The Single Game Units
Generation one for the first part were the pong clones. The above is an image of the unit that I remember playing as a kid but unfortunately I didn’t get to play very much of it. My nephew had borrowed it and apparently left the image up on screen all night and burned it into the very expensive zenith cabinet television that my grandparents had, and from that point forward it was only used with the utmost of caution and under full supervision. Even as we entered the Nintendo era of gaming, said Grandparents refused to let me hook any game consoles up to any of their televisions. For the most part the consoles in this generation were a single game, or a number of game modes that were switchable on unit.
Generation Two – The Era of Cartridges
This is the era that was the counter effect of the arcade boom and in my memory was dominated by the Atari 2600. The defining feature of this generation was the inclusion of some way of swapping games, usually through a cartridge slot. For the most part, even though I played a pong clone… the Atari 2600 was the first video game system that I considered to be mine. I remember a few friends had the Intellivision or the ColecoVision… and a very rare few had an Atari 5200… but the vast majority were 2600 kids. I won’t lie I have a certain nostalgia for the wood grain era of gaming, and I really would have loved to have seen a Vectrex in its prime.
Generation Three – The 8-Bit Era
The second generation was exceptionally long, not necessarily because it was still booming but more that video games crashed hard in the late 70s and early 80s. This generation was largely heralded by the introduction of better 8 bit graphics into the equation. It was not until the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System that this marketplace revived, and with it was a change to start treating these things as toys rather than living room computers. For me 1987 was the “Nintendo Christmas”, and I remember it being legitimately the only thing I wanted that year and I was scared to death when nothing vaguely Nintendo shaped showed up under the Christmas tree. I remember the consoles being in extremely short supply, but ultimately I got the set I wanted with the all important Super Mario Bros. The folks left out in the cold here were the kids who ended up getting a Sega Master System, because they couldn’t quite join in the recess huddles talking about game strategy, and absolutely couldn’t participate in swapping cartridges.
Generation Four – The 16-Bit Era
This era is really my favorite and the one I am the most nostalgic for, but it was also a really odd generation. It is largely signified by the inclusion of 16 bit graphics, but as a result you have a few odd cases where technically the Sega Genesis and the Turbografx 16 were contemporaries of both the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo. Ultimately this generation will forever be marked by the competition between the SNES and the Genesis and the various advertising campaigns fomenting this. The staggered nature of the generation was a bit odd because even though the Genesis and Turbografx released in 1989, they wouldn’t really have much impact in toppling the older 8 Bit NES. This was also the first generation when I owned more than one console, as I got a used Genesis Model 1 pretty late in the cycle.
Generation Five – The CD-ROM ERA
Things get a little squirrely with this generation as well as you ended up with a mix of “32 bit” and “64 bit” graphical processing, or at least that was the advertising at the time. In the case of Nintendo it was a 32 bit CPU and a 128 bit graphical processor… and apparently they averaged these numbers to get 64? The Nintendo 64 and the Atari Jaguar clung to the more expensive to manufacturer and more limited space of the cartridge, but the vast majority of consoles in this generation made the leap to the new and exciting CD-Rom technology. This is also the era of the Modchip and rampant console piracy with many offerings in this generation having little to no protection other than the thought that at the time CD Burners were terribly expensive. The most popular consoles of this generation were the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. The strangest consoles of this generation were likely the 3DO and the Atari Jaguar… which did some interesting things but never really caught on and looking back have very few games that would be considered as classics.
Generation Six – The DVD Era
I am calling it the DVD Era because that was the new hotness and every single console above uses some sort of DVD drive technology, with the Dreamcast and the Gamecube going to lengths to obfuscate this fact. However for me there are really two key things that happened. First it was the death of Sega, with the Dreamcast failing to gain traction and being more or less killed by piracy. This meant with it the death of the old Sega versus Nintendo Rivalry, but as that banner fell the next generation of Microsoft versus Sony stepped in to take its place. This also more or less begins the era of Nintendo not really trying to compete directly with the other consoles and doing its own thing, which is a strategy that have served them well throughout the generations. The Sony PlayStation was the clear winner of the generation, but the Dreamcast will always hold a special place in my heart. While I never owned one the Xbox was essentially a PC in a black plastic box and I remember all of my friends that had them modding and doing all sorts of nonsense to dump games to the hard drive.
Generation Seven – The Online Gaming Era
This is a weird generation, because looking back the highest selling console is also the least relevant to the direction in which gaming has moved. The Nintendo Wii sold over 100 million consoles and became a craze with folks who you absolutely did not expect to own one playing Wii Bowling. The thing is… it didn’t convert people into core gamers and I know so many people who bought a Wii and never played anything other than the sports pack in disc. I think a truer representation of this generation and how it moved things forward is that this is the era in which online gaming dominated the platforms. Sure the Dreamcast offered pretty reasonable online play, and you could get a PS2 or Saturn online with a lot of hoops to jump through… but the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 were internet native consoles and finally knew how the hell to handle this interaction with Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. Nintendo still to this day doesn’t entirely know what the hell to do with the internet. This is also the generation where severe mistakes were made and Sony had the hubris to expect to dominate this generation the way they had the previous and unintendedly made a machine that was hell to develop for.
Generation Eight – The Digital Distribution Era
Sure you could download games on the Xbox 360, Wii and the PlayStation 3… but it was only specific games and often times limited to ports of older generations or independent games. It was during the Eighth generation that we figured out digital distribution in the proper way, with the ability to buy any game that was being released on day one from the comfort of your home and often times have it downloaded well ahead of time and unlocked at midnight. This is a generation that saw the biggest console flop in years in the form of the WiiU and the effective reboot of the same games to critical acclaim in the form of the exceptionally versatile Nintendo Switch. Microsoft started the generation leaning entirely too heavily on trying to go back to the era of being the “Livingroom PC” that did everything including watch television for you. However after this misstep they carved a really solid path forward with Games with Live and now Game Pass. PlayStation on the other hand rode into the generation with the exceptional value of PlayStation Plus that they used to turn around the previous generation, and more or less squandered that. PlayStation however still stands strong on its exclusives that have only recently been making their way to the PC. The PlayStation 4 has sold the most units, but I feel like Nintendo with the Switch will eventually surpass that.
Generation Nine – ???
So here we sit on the precipice of the ninth console generation, and I have no idea what the eventual hallmark of this generation will be. I think the challenge with this generation is that it doesn’t feel like it is a significant leap forward. As we have moved each generational leap has felt smaller, and largely just being indicated by slightly higher resolutions and graphical fidelity. Maybe ray tracing will be a game changer, or maybe this will be the generation finally capable of delivering virtual reality for the masses. Right now however both consoles that release in November are deeply unproven as to how exactly they are going to make their mark. They are both effectively the same PC being sold under different brands, because at the end of the day the difference between the hardware being offered is marginal.
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