The Inbetweensies

Hey Friends! I find myself in an old familiar rut that I have been in several times. Essentially I flail around at night trying to figure out exactly what I want to be playing, because nothing sounds quite right. This generally happens when there is a game on the horizon that I absolutely want to be playing but it isn’t yet available. Right now that game is Outriders and it is ultimately the game that I want to be playing. The challenge there that makes it all the more frustrating is I have access to play the demo as much as I want, but I also know that if I grind that demo into the ground it will ultimately spell doom for my long term engagement with the game.
I played a bit of Destiny 2, but found myself losing interest the longer that I played. Weirdly I think last nights problem was the fact that I didn’t engage this week until Sunday night, aka two days from reset. I think maybe tonight will be different since I won’t feel quite the pressure to wrap things up and get weekly rewards from things. I did manage to finish up Gambit and get that powerful engram. I am finding myself enjoying Battlegrounds quite a bit. This season has an enjoyable pattern of play where you do some other activities to get Cabal gold to “smash that like button”… aka hammer of proving and break a chest in the battleground. I am still bummed about Steelfeather Repeater being one season away from grandfathered into being a permanent weapon.
Valheim and I are in a weird place right now. I’ve pretty much done everything that I want to do with the game for right now. I have two massive bases and have been just sorta flitting around the map building a portal network and weird outposts. I may be finding myself winding down until the new biomes go into the game, which is a very familiar place for me as I went through similar patterns with Minecraft over the years. Mostly I have not taken down the final boss that is in the game right now, because I have heard in numerous places that when you take that boss down… Goblins become a normal spawn. I’ve already felt like my advancement has adversely impacted the server that I play on… and because of that I really don’t want to subject lowbies to such a painful encounter as random packs of Goblins.
Speaking of Minecraft… I guess I am winding down there as well. I hit it pretty hard and heavy for awhile between trying to record a daily series on YouTube while experimenting with Hardcore mode, to playing on BotchCraft to playing on my own private Realm. I think for now I am probably in a holding pattern until 1.17 drops officially and I swap over to a brand new random seed to explore the cave update nonsense. I’ve spent some time over in the Nether and found two blaze spawners that are beside each other… which leads me to want to try building a blaze farm… but that has yet to happen. Right now I mostly log in… say hi to my cats and log right back out.
So what did I do instead of all of the above last night? I apparently reinstalled Final Fantasy XV and attempted to get back into it. I feel like I am desperately searching for something to hold my attention for a month until Outriders launches. I also installed Bravely Default 2 on my Switch, but have not touched it. I could go for something mostly single player for awhile because I know when Outriders launches I will be engaged with lots of people once again as I attempt to do groupy content. I think in the back of my mind I am looking for another Dragon Age Inquisition style experience to tide me over until it is time to poke my head out of my hole again. Being in-between the game you want to be playing and the games you have access to is maddening at times… but also a supremely first world problem. My life seems to always been perforated by moments of being unsatisfied with everything. I wish I could get rid of that feeling because it is not terribly enjoyable to go through. The post The Inbetweensies appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Fort Bel, Outriders and Destiny

Morning Friends! Surprising to no one I played an excessive amount of Valheim over the weekend. We talked a bit about it on the podcast but I am quickly realizing that for me it is just a different sort of gaming experience. Like when I have played Minecraft in the past, the adventure is fine… but at the end of the day it always ends up being about the building. So since I am slowly moving on past my first foothold in the shared server environment, I thought I would at least talk about it a bit this morning. While my foothold has evolved into something that everyone just generally refers to as “Fort Bel” the truth is it started out as me trying to stay out of everyone else’s hair since I was further progressed.
I posted a walkthrough video of Shade’s Folly aka my starter place on the island. The goal was to run down the coast and sorta do my own thing while everyone else caught up, and as a result I never really assisted much in the building of what became the main town hub for our island. What was originally the building shown on the lefthand side of the screen, I eventually added the second building… and then proceeded the erect a giant stone wall around the entire compound and build further structures directly connected to that wall. This also caused me to create a more shared crafting area and open up my storage reserves to pretty much everyone on the server.
The longer I have been here however the more stale it has gotten. There isn’t that much more I can do with my current location because I risk taking up more space and encroaching upon the territory of those who built around me. Additionally I am on the border of the nearest entrance to the Black Forest and I don’t want to “unwild” that region any more than it already is. As a result I have gone out onto the ocean in search of new areas and at some point I will probably do other walkthrough videos talking about each of them. The biggest of these is Dawn’s Rest or what folks are just mostly universally referring to as “Castle Bel”.
I also played quite a bit of the Outriders demo this weekend, and hit the level cap. I could in theory do like the YouTube community has been doing and grind their faces off against a tiny amount of content trying to farm things… or I could just stop playing. I am likely going to more or less stop playing. I’ve spent a tiny bit of time trying out the other classes but I am pretty certain that Devastator is the class for me. So far my second favorite is Trickster… but they both sorta do the same thing where they are up close and personal with targets which seems to fit my enjoyment pattern with aggressive gameplay and bad decision. Really looking forward to the launch of this game at the end of the month.
The thing that I was NOT expecting this weekend is that I ended up firing up Destiny 2 and playing some of it last night. It is amazing how much more enjoyment I get out of the game now that I know that the weapons I am earning won’t be irrelevant now that the gear Sunset has officially been called off. Unfortunately one of my favorite Auto Rifles is in the sunset, so I will be trying to find a new favorite Kinetic Auto since Steelfeather Repeater is already sunset. Anything that is not currently sunset should be fair game however, so I am hoping to get a few Shadow Price variants to see if I like that weapon. I vaguely remember it from Destiny 1, but not extremely well. Like every weekend it went entirely too fast. Time moves extremely strangely in the time of the self imposed lockdown. What did you get up to this weekend? Did you check out Outriders? What were your thoughts. The post Fort Bel, Outriders and Destiny appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.