Good Morning Folks! I was realizing this morning just how completely out of date my blog side bar is when it comes to the games that I have been playing regularly. In theory I claim that this is my semi-monthly process of trueing up the sidebar so it represents the sorts of games that I am playing. What actually happens is that I go for large blocks of time without updating this and when that happens massive swings occur. For example the last one of these that I did was in October of 2020 and some stuff has changed. So here goes an attempt at maybe doing these regularly again for a bit. For those not already indoctrinated into the process I divide things up into a few categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
To Those Remaining
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
My sweet sweet Diablo 3, you are rarely ever gone from this list. There is even a new season starting this Friday and I am looking forward to going through the routine of the seasonal grind. This season has a bunch of changes to the game and as a result they sorta gave us a greatest hits collection of sets available through Haedrigs Gift. As a result I am looking at probably starting a Whirlrend Barbarian for this season because those are so stinking fun to play.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS5
I am going to be honest, I am leaving this one on the list more as an aspirational placement than a game I am truly actively playing. I boot it up from time to time and play through a few encounters and then put it to bed for a longer period of time. I hope to get back in and play it more intently because also while we have been spilling truth… I feel a little guilty that I am not really doing much with my PlayStation 5.
Hades – PC and Switch
This one retains its spot because it is still probably my go to “playing switch from bed” game. The pattern of play just fits spending a few minutes before falling asleep. I am not terribly good at it but I enjoy it mechanically and thematically. This is the only game I have played where I enjoy losing, because it means I am going to get some more story beats.
New World – PC
I am leaving this on the list for reasons of which I am contractually not at liberty to talk about. It comes out in August officially and I am looking forward to that release. I’ve never seen a game that has gone through quite so many changes during its late development cycle as this one. It is going to be interesting to see the state of this game at launch. I have quite a bit of faith in it.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, RG350, Retroid, Raspberry Pi 4
Still very much spending a chunk of my time playing games that I grew up with… that are now referred to as Retro games. Still feels really weird to be calling them Retro to be honest. Actually yesterday I literally just got an 8 gb Raspberry Pi 4 model in that I am going to be playing with. That is probably going to become my main emulation device for the short term for anything other than higher end stuff like Cemu that absolutely requires the power of my gaming PC.
To The New and Returning
Destiny 2 – PC
Putting this one back on the list because I am technically playing it again. I am nowhere near as engaged with it as I would like to be and I am not exactly certain why that is the case. From all accounts this is a really good season but I find myself just unable to get stuck into it very deeply. Since we are trueing things up it is in somewhat regular rotation so it is going to get a spot on the list.
The Elder Scrolls Online – PC
I am experiencing a massive renaissance of Elder Scrolls Online and it has rapidly become my primary game over the past month. While I am mostly leveling alts right now, I am going to return to the normal course of trying to quest my way through all of the content in the game and maybe just maybe be ready for the launch of the next expansion in June. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing because I have to make it through large blocks of content and I know I will become distracted by other games that spring up along the way.
Minecraft – PC Java Client
Another thing that happened since my previous update is that I have returned to Minecraft in a huge way. I spent a lot of time playing solo and even recorded a semi-daily YouTube series on my adventures. Now however I spend my time either popping between my own private Realms world or a closed server run by my friend Zeli. Not playing near as much as I was but I am still popping in and wandering around. There is a stronghold in the nether that I am clearing and trying to set up a dual blaze farm right now so I still have projects that I am plugging away at. Right now I am likely going to wait to re-engage heavily until the new caves update comes out and create a brand new world.
Outriders – PC
Outriders is the new looter shooter hotness that is shipping tomorrow officially. I played the hell out of the demo and now am looking forward to consuming this game peacefully. I am not really planning on playing it as my primary game because I am super engaged with Elder Scrolls right now, but I am absolutely going to slow grind it. The launch time is just really bad because it overlaps with a bunch of other things going on like the launch of a new Diablo 3 season.
Valheim – PC
Valheim is freaking great. If you do not already own this game you should pick it up because it is dirt cheap and one hell of a lot of fun. I’ve reached a point of equilibrium with this game at least until new content ships. I had been playing regularly on a server but I have mostly been playing lately on my solo world. When the hearth and home update ships, I might start a new world depending on how deep the changes go. I will likely always keep Beltopia around given that it is set up nicely for crafting and such.
To Those Departing
Genshin Impact – Android/PC
I have no real idea why I bounced the way that I have from this game. I think partially it might just be that I don’t love “maintenance gaming” where all I am really doing is dailies. However in this game that isn’t even true because they have released a ton of story content since I last played and I never can quite bring myself to come back and play it. There are a lot of things about this game that work so well and then a lot of things that just frustrate me. For example the fact that I feel like I don’t have a reasonable manner in which to level new characters and catch them up to my core party… means that I largely feel like I am stuck always using my core party. Maybe at some point I will return when it ships on the Switch but for now it is a distant memory.
World of Warcraft – PC
Shadowlands is a bad expansion filled with systems that I am not interested in engaging with. In fact I would probably say that Shadowlands is going to be up there with the worst expansions of all time. I talked about how frustrated I was with Battle for Azeroth, but at least that is an expansion that I actively enjoyed the leveling process. Shadowlands I barely made it to the level cap with one of my characters and couldn’t even manage to stomach a single zone on my alts. I am not exactly sure how things went off the rails in the manner that they did but for now at least I am done with the game. Like I have not talked about it a lot because in truth I am not even sure it is worth talking about it. I miss hanging out with my friends who play the game but I miss nothing about Shadowlands.
Ships Passing in the Night
Cyberpunk 2077 – PC
Unlike most of the internet I have nothing but love for this game. I apparently had a sufficient system to play it and lucked out on not encountering many bugs during my play through. As such I am actively craving more content for it, but throwing it on the “ships” list because I have more or less put the game aside for the moment. When DLC releases I will either play through the DLC on my current play through or start a brand new campaign. I hope the issues surrounding this game do not kill this franchise because I loved it deeply on so many different levels.
Dragon Age Inquisition – PC
Dragon Age Inquisition was one of those games that I had bounced off of so many times in the past and then suddenly was able to play happily. I have found with the hustle and bustle of the end of the year… I crave deep single player experiences. This is one of those games that I played during that period and had a blast. Looking forward to this story continuing.
Jedi Fallen Order – PC
When this game first released I tried playing it with a controller because it seemed like that was the proper way to play it. I bounced because the game is not terribly good at explaining when you should leave a planet. However over the holiday break I returned to the game and had a blast, this time playing with my more native control scheme of keyboard and mouse. Truly great game and great experience. If you have not played this game you really owe it to yourself to do so, especially if you like Star Wars even in the least bit.
Knights of the Old Republic 2 – PC
Another game that I have bounced off numerous times is Knights of the Old Republic 2 and for some reason over this break I managed to make my way through it. Like the game is a mess… there is no getting around that but it is a mess that I am happy to have experienced. There is a lot of interesting things going on in this game and knowing now that this released before Fallout New Vegas I can see some of the things that they expanded upon later and made work better in that game. Would I recommend it to someone else? Probably not, but I am still very happy to have experienced it myself.
Summary
The funny thing about this is that I just realized upon writing out this post… that my sidebar was never actually updated from the October edition meaning it was even more out of date than I realized. Now I will hopefully remember to do the thing and actually make the updates once I finish with this post. Here is to also maybe doing this at least once a quarter going forward… if not monthly.
The post Regularly Playing: March 2021 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I realize I am extremely late to this party, but for those who have not yet heard the news there is a rumored discussion happening about Microsoft purchasing Discord. This acquisition has a rumored 10 billion dollar price tag associated with it and there are many articles talking about it so I am just going to link this one. This is apparently causing a large amount of discontent among the gamer circles, but I feel like this knee jerk reaction might be a little too fast. There are some things you have to understand before starting this article. My entire working career has been tied to Microsoft products and as such I have seen the ebb and flow of different initiatives. I’ve even been at several Microsoft development conferences over the years and had the benefit of meeting Bill Gates in the flesh during one of those cattle call meet and greet sessions. I feel like I sit comfortably in a camp between the Microsoft fanboys and the Microsoft doomsayers.
Microsoft has been on a bit of an acquisition spree of late snapping up a number of game studios, including the most recent Zenimax acquisition which largely just means Bethesda Softworks to most folks. From what I have seen so far, Microsoft appears to be a good steward of these games properties. For example I have followed Undead Labs pretty closely being a major fan of the State of Decay franchise and from what I can tell… Microsoft money has taken a lot of pressure off the studio to just do the stuff that they do best. Other commentary from folks at Obsidian and Double Fine seem to indicate the same. Not having to worry about how to make the next payroll probably does wonders for creativity in allowing folks to actually just sorta create the games.
However there is a very recent Microsoft failure in the minds of gamers and I think it is coloring their opinions right now. In 2016 Microsoft acquired a plucky little start up streaming platform called Beam and then proceeded to change its name to Mixer and pour copious amounts of resources into trying to make it a viable alternative to Twitch. This was a losing proposition from the moment Microsoft started down this path but it did give folks for awhile an alternative. The problem with this match up however is while you had Mixer backed by Microsoft, you also had Twitch backed by the power of Amazon. Twitch was already the brand leader in streaming, to a degree that not even YouTube has ever really been able to steal much market share away from them.
Having used both as a streamer and as a viewer… I personally believe that Beam/Mixer was the superior product. However I also believe that there was no fighting the purple juggernaut called Twitch. Having streamed on multiple platforms, there are just way more people that interact with Twitch as a whole and it becomes progressively harder and harder to convince your viewers to use anything other than that platform. Much like there will never really be a WoW Killer or a Facebook Killer… it is highly unlikely that anyone will ever top Twitch for streaming. They are just too dug into that niche and while I blame Microsoft for doing a piss poor job of notifying the streamers that they were going to be closing their doors… I don’t blame them for the failure of the platform.
However in the last week I have watched multiple communities attempt a quick migration away from Discord over a fear of something that may never actually come to fruition. It seems like a number of folks are jumping over to a service called Guilded, but largely it suffers from some of the same questions we have had for awhile. Like this has been the topic of many discussions among the AggroChat crew trying to glean exactly how Discord or a service like Guilded actually makes their money. Sure Discord has Nitro and Server boosts, but that cannot pay for anything close to the amount of server processing power, bandwidth and disk space required to keep a service like theirs up and running. Guilded similarly plans on offering premium access accounts and skins but likewise that cannot come close to paying the infrastructure bills.
In 1973 the artists Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman produced a short video titled “Television Delivers People” which from what I can tell is the initiation point of the old adage “You’re Not the Customer; You’re the Product”. I mean we have seen that written a number of different ways over the years but the words largely speak true. Any time you are not paying for a product, there is something that you are adding to the process that is valuable and are essentially creating the product that is sold. That product could be usage statistics or in the case of television access to your eyeballs and by reference your wallet and spending habits. So I have long tried to sort out what exactly is Discord or Guilded for that matter selling about us that makes it worth keeping a service up and running.
In the case of Microsoft reportedly looking at spending 10 Billion dollars to Acquire Discord, that transaction makes a lot of sense. Discord does a really good job of providing a free alternative to Teamspeak or Ventrilo and also does a pretty solid job of letting folks roll their own communities on the fly. While I love Teams… there are without a doubt some aspects of it that could be improved through an infusion of tech resources coming from a company who has likely been trying to keep things running on a relatively slim tech stack. Additionally Xbox Live chat sucks horrifically and if you could simply gut it and plug discord in its place… you would have an immediate fix to what feels like a sub par implementation that has not aged well. Similarly Skype is not a great user experience and could likely be refreshed greatly with an infusion of newer technology as well.
So this one acquisition for Microsoft serves to solve three potential problems in their aging infrastructure. Those products all make money for the company and it is pretty clear how the benefit works in each of those scenarios. Truthfully I would feel better about using Discord if I better understood its funding model and also knew that the folks working for the company would benefit from the stability of a massive corporation backing them. I’ve known several folks that worked at Microsoft over the years and from what I have been able to glean it seems like a relatively good place to work. It seems like they invest quite a bit of resources in their employees so I can’t see that it would be a bad call for anyone specifically looking to be acquired. While Mixer is a glaring exception, they do tend to support tech significantly longer than someone like Google that has a large graveyard of promising tech that they have buried.
Essentially to the gamers freaking out about this potentially happening… I would say to chill the fuck out. Microsoft has done some pretty cool things. Xbox Game Pass for example is quite possibly the best value in gaming right now and is extremely pro-consumer. Similarly they have done a pretty great job as the steward of Minecraft with significant development effort poured into that product and still maintaining both the more open ended Java client and the more locked down and regulated C# based Bedrock client. Again I get that a lot of this reaction is over Mixer, but that product was never going to claw away significant market share from Twitch no matter how many big name celebrities they convinced monetarily to switch platforms. The streaming market is too stratified and it will take a major paradigm shift for anything to beat team purple.
The evidence I see in front of me though, would tell me that Discord who is already a market leader in the services they provide would be just fine under the umbrella of Microsoft. Chances are the funding would allow them to grow and expand product offerings and maybe just maybe utilize some of the streaming tech. I can see a future where the Xbox client is replaced by a modified version of Discord that offers all of the same functionality. It seems like a pretty good future to me honestly.
The post Panic at the Discord appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Friends! I did some nonsense this weekend. When we last spoke… and yes I am treating this blog like a two way conversation even though I am the one hogging this discussion… I was talking about leveling using the Jesters Festival buff and Dark Anchor grinding in Alik’r Desert. Since that post I have finished off my Two Hander Warden and decided to set a new target of my Destruction Necromancer. Since that previous goal that I didn’t talk about… I have finished off that character as well and dinged 50 last night during Walking Dead. As a result I am once again setting a new mission to work on Belghast Thornbite aka my Nightblade that will ultimately be bow/dual wield.
So I feel like at this point some perspective is needed. I am doing this because my joy in Elder Scrolls Online is casually working my way through quest content. However I also suffer from this annoyance that as I am leveling alts… I am not also contributing to my account as a whole. Champion Points are an alternate advancement system much like Paragon Points from Diablo 3. The more you play the game the more you get access to additional perks and while leveling through content I would love to know that at least on some level I am advancing the overall ranking of my account. This is ultimately what lead me to power level my alts using this experience buff so that I can return to leveling them slowly but also be improving my account level as well.
So you might be asking yourself… what amount of time did it actually take you to level your Necromancer since it started the lowest level. The problem with this notion is I have no clue how much play time I had actually spent prior to starting this. If I type /played in game it shows that I have 14 hours and 51 minutes on this character and I would say a maximum of 2 hours was spent prior to this grind. So that leaves you with an estimate of around 13 hours to level all the way up using Dark Anchors and overlapping the Jesters Festival buff and Experience Scrolls. Not exactly the fastest thing in the world with the core problem that things slow down significantly once you pass your 20s and again in your 30s and 40s.
It also greatly depends on how good the group is that you are with. If they are active and tagging every single mob then you are going to reap the benefit of a significant amount more experience than just from closing the Dark Anchor. So for example in the above group I can see that two people are now showing up as being in combat meaning that there are two people who are just soaking up experience while semi-afk. Ultimately that harms everyone in the group and I probably should have kicked them out given that I was leading this alphabet party.
Another thing that I talked about in the last post was the AutoInvite addon. If you are looking to do large scale group content, then I would suggest going ahead and downloading this. Ultimately this is what allows folks to auto invite when a phase is typed in chat. There was no Z group and there were no openings in X or Y and as such I decided to fill that role. It is super easy to turn on and all I had to type was “/ai z” to assume the mantle of inviting people off the “z” trigger. To turn it off likewise was just typing “/ai” without an argument. It seems like there is always a struggle to find someone to take a group over when the previous leader needs to leave. When I was nearing 50 I started trying to find a replacement and ultimately did so that the group could continue on after I tagged out. For reference here is the addon and its requirement.
So you might be telling yourself that 13 hours is still a really long time to level in an MMORPG. This is very true but I ended up streaming my original leveling experience in Elder Scrolls Online and it was somewhere between 40 and 50 hours. For reference on my main character that I have spent the majority of my time playing over the years I have 21 days 9 hours and 42 minutes of play time, which sounds like a lot but is on par with the amount of time I have spent in Destiny 2 for example. Essentially for me personally that 13 hour investment per character will let me feel better about leveling them in the long fun given that I am just able to enjoy quest content while knowing my account is improving as a result.
The post Leveling Aftermath appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! We missed last week because Bel was knocked a little bit down after his second Covid-19 Vaccination, but all is well and we are back this week. We end up running quite a little bit over on this show. We start talking about the unrealistic expectations of gamers and the nonsensical $10,000 MMO Kickstarter. We talk about what the Disney Plus Marvel One Shot series are doing and how we have never quite seen this sort of thing before. We talk relatively spoiler free about Falcon and Winter Soldier, and then say goodbye to Duck Tales. From there we talk about Elder Scrolls Online and the semi-spontaneous return to the game and all of the content we have been playing.
Topics Discussed:
The $10,000 MMO
DreamWorld
Discussion about unrealistic expectations in gaming
