Tales of the Aggronaut

We are now firmly in 2022 and I am getting back into the swing of waking up at a reasonable time again. One of the posts I had originally planned on making before the end of the year was a quick run down of some of the high and low points for the year. That did not happen however because “vacation mode” but I still think it might be an interesting discussion. So here we are dusting off a list that I started as a notepad document. Side note… my machine is littered with tiny text files that I start up and scribble some quick information on and then rarely return to. text files are effectively my digital post it notes.

High Points

The sequence of events that lead to this purchase are so wildly off the wall. In this time of being unable to find a graphics card at all… I happened to stumble onto a boutique pre-built with a 3080… that arrived on my actual birthday… and then somehow convinced my wife to spend an exorbitant amount of money on it. It was a phenomenal sequence of events and I am still overwhelmingly happy with this purchase. My entire gaming rig was from 2015 and while the graphics card had been upgraded… it was getting to the point of just needing to replace everything all at once. This was by far the best possible sequence of events that could have happened.

This year I fell into a lot of nostalgia about Minecraft and more specifically about the hardcore mode that I had never played around with. I recorded a series of me playing Minecraft and while it did not last that terribly long… in fact it pretty much ended spectacularly the first time I attempted going into the nether. I really enjoyed the process of recording these videos and could see myself returning to something like this in the future when I have a fixed project in mind surrounding a game. I mean nothing I do ever really garners a ton of viewers/readers/listeners but it brought me joy to be creating this. Even if only my closest friends ever watched any of it… I am fine with that. One of my favorite things to come out of last year was the project that ultimately got named Mixtape Mondays. Essentially each week I would release a brand new mixtape… and by mixtape I mean a custom Spotify Playlist with album art and a proper name. I had so much fun creating all of these “albums” and I have no clue how many people actually listened to them but I could absolutely see myself doing something like this again. My creativity basically lasted through twenty of these before I ultimately needed to take a very long break. If you are curious about them you can check out the Mixtape Mondays archive page. Folks… I cannot tell you how many times I have attempted to play Dragon Age Inquisition and bounced off it completely. Dragon Age Origins is one of my favorite games, and I have played through it numerous times start to finish. However there was just something about Inquisition that rubbed me the wrong way, and the way the game is structured…. made it exceptionally easy for me to get derailed along the way. I own this game on multiple platforms, thinking maybe I would like it better as a console game… but it took until this year that the game managed to finally grab me. When it did however it did not let go and I consumed every last bit of the experience with fervor. Now this is probably my favorite game in the entire Dragon Age series, but it was a hard fought battle to get there. Really if you had to pin a single thing on this year… I would call it the year of Final Fantasy XIV for me. I’ve never seen a game that was effectively in a content lull… bloom the way that this game bloomed. For me it was getting back in touch with my love of Eorzea and figuring out how to carve out my own goals. This culminated in the launch of Endwalker which is quite possibly the best MMORPG expansion story I have ever experienced. That might be a little unfair to other games however because this was the freaking Marvel Endgame moment for an MMORPG franchise where an entire decade worth of plot lines coalesced into a giant crescendo. Earlier I talked about how Dragon Age is one of my favorite games, but it is very much not my favorite Bioware title. That honor belongs to Mass Effect and I still feel like in spite of not really sticking the landing in the third outing… it is one of the best gaming and storytelling experiences. I would love to see this series turned into a high production value streaming era series. For years I had wanted them to go back and tweak the first game in the series to make it a bit more playable… and that is precisely what the Legendary Edition does among other things. Sure the first game still ends up being more awkward than the later titles, but it is in so much better shape than it used to be and this now serves as the perfect point to return to the series. While I have lost much of my faith in Bioware… I desperately want to see this series continued in a fashion befitting its roots.

Mixed Feelings

I cannot tell you how much I wanted this game to land. Within my own gaming circles we have the group of people for which Destiny really landed and a group for which Warframe grabbed hold. Each time a new looter shooter comes on the market, I keep hoping it will be the one that unifies the camps and gives us a single default game to keep returning to. Outriders could have been that game… but the horrifically bleak story lost a lot of my friends and kept them from even giving this game the time of the day. It isn’t every day you are expected to play through a literal concentration camp with bodies stacked like cordwood. If they ever gave players the ability to jump straight to the endgame… I think maybe just maybe I might be able to convince more of them to try it out. The game is in pretty good shape, but still honestly a little spartan. I am interested to see what the expansion content adds and if it revitalizes things a bit. I love Phantasy Star Online 2, but it also very much feels like you are playing a game from over a decade ago. I had these huge hopes that New Genesis would breathe new life into the game for me and ease some of the hurdles that you are expected to overcome to get into the base PSO2 client. I am not sure exactly why… but I just could not get into the game at all. I am not even certain if I managed to complete the tutorial. Phantasy Star Online 2 got me by on sheer nostalgia by being extremely similar in feel at times to my beloved original Phantasy Star Online. New Genesis was open world in a way that felt awful to me and it didn’t really feel like anything I was doing had much meaning. I might boot this up at some point in the future and give it another shot, but I bounced pretty freaking hard and I am not really sure if it is my fault or the game.

Low Points

I went through one of the most stressful years that I have experienced at work. I dealt with a pretty awful situation that spawned seventy hour work weeks for about two months… and then spent the next six months dealing with the ramifications of those events. On top of that at the end of this year I had my friend and mentor retire… causing me to feel more than a little unmoored. Yesterday was my first day back and it was supremely weird not to be talking to him throughout the day. The next few months are likely to bring even more changes, and I am not sure how I am going to feel about any of them. I know I am being somewhat vague here, but suffice to say it was a very bad year. If there was a game that I was looking forward to more than probably any… it was New World. I had been involved in testing the game for a long time and devoted countless hours to the title. In fact if steam is at all correct… I have put in over 600 hours not counting any time spent testing. I’ve never seen a game with so much promise… consistently make the worst possible decision when confronted with a challenge. I think patch 1.1 is going to go down in history as quite possibly the worst MMORPG patch I have ever seen play out. It more or less killed the game for me and I think many other players. I held on to see how things shook out with server mergers, but right now after seven servers were merged into one… Frislandia sits around 1200 players during prime time… which ironically is what Minda had when players were first beginning to call it “dead”. The player numbers seem to have stabilized with Europe making up the lions share of its peak 102,000 daily players. This however is a far cry from the over 900,000 peak players at launch. I still think there is a good game here, but it needs so much work and a better understanding of what the players that left actually wanted. This is still a pretty fresh wound so I am not sure how much I can really talk about it today. Last month we lost her due to complications of diabetes. The average for a cat after being diagnosed with diabetes is about three additional years and we got a little over four. I feel like I should probably count myself lucky for that extra years time, but it certain doesn’t feel lucky right now. Mostly it just feels painful to think about my baby girl being gone. She was my partner in crime and pretty much at my side at all times during the day. I miss her every single day. Unless you are willfully ignorant… you will know that this has been a bad year for anyone who follows Blizzard games. The year has been a slow motion parade of grossness as we continue to learn new things about rampant harassment and generally bad policies and working conditions. For me personally… I have distanced myself from anything Blizzard or Activision during this time. While I was not actively playing World of Warcraft for other reasons… namely just how bad Shadowlands felt… I was playing Diablo 3 pretty much every month. My friend Grace and I had this tradition of rolling new characters each time a season started and that is now completely gone. Neither of us can bring ourselves to keep playing these games. It is this awful Catch 22 as well… because the only way change is going to happen is if the corporate overlords start to feel pain monetarily. However this is going to actively harm all of the good folks that I am friends with who are currently working there. So while I support the Better ABK initiative… I just can’t do Blizzard products anymore and not until the simple demands of this initiative have been met and it seems as though change is actually happening. If I woke up tomorrow and found out that Bobby Kotick had been removed from any role in the company… I think that might be the line in the sand required to get me to back down off this point. I will say I miss the hell out of Diablo though, and nothing has managed to scratch that itch.

Denouement

Well that is my list. I think for the most part I covered everything that made a significant impact on me this calendar year. I would love to hear some of your own highs and lows. Drop me a line below and even if I don’t reply quickly, know that I always read the comments. The post Highs and Lows of 2021 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Last night I had an interesting dream and since I am presently in vacation mode… and doing a pretty poor job of actually daily blogging I thought I would talk about it a bit. In the dream my wife and I were roaming around and drove past this massive line of people waiting to get into a building. I stopped to try and figure out what was going on, and someone said it was a “book sale” which piqued my wife’s interests. We stood in the long line and as we were getting close to the front we noticed that all of the products on the store were covered in wrapping to where you couldn’t tell what any one product actually was. Everything in the store was extremely cheap, but the one rule is that you had no idea exactly what you were buying. So for example in the book section it would be a book securely wrapped that said something like “Sci-Fi Book” and then a very vague synopsis of what the book was about. They a pretty wide variety of things that were not books as well. So you might find a box that said “Computer Monitor” and it listed some general specifications of the monitor like that it was capable of 1080p or 1440p. However the books were like a dollar or cheaper and the electronics were like $50 for one of those monitors.

The staff scurried around the tables constantly restocking items as it slowly trickled out of what had to be a massive stock of things. The end result was that it did not feel like those who were late getting there were at a significant disadvantage to those who got there first. We loaded up a cart of things that we were willing to take a gamble on and made our way to the checkout. It turns out one of the people who I went to High School was working the register and she filled in some other details about the store. It seems like every time they held one of these events they sold out completely, and that a lot of the things were assorted factory overstock that would not sell normally, but because of the cheap price and the mystery box conceit that it all went every single time. It was around this time that I woke up and told my wife about the dream. She immediately grasped the concept and I think a lot of the visuals were drawn from my own experiences going to one of these big sales. Half priced books is a chain that you may or may not have near you, and the store itself is phenomenal. However once or twice a year they rent out a convention center and have a big “everything must go” sale where they haul out box after box of things that were not moving in the stores for some reason. The above image is from one of these sales in Arlington Texas, and while we personally did not buy much I could absolutely see the appeal. It does make me wonder how well a mystery box store would do. We seem to have this inherit desire to gamble on getting something really good from an unknown loot box. The assorted subscription box services like Loot Crate seem to still be doing really well for themselves. I know I personally have enjoyed when a store makes up grab bags just because there is some element of surprise to the process. The main difference with the store from my dreams though is that the items they were selling really were more valuable than the price they were selling them for. So often with mystery boxes you technically get more value on paper than what you paid, but it isn’t actually stuff that you would have wanted. Loot Crates seem to have a higher percentage of dollar store kitsch like stickers… than they do actual things that you would have spent money on in the first place.

I know Gamestop does this on the regular for anything that is not selling in their stores, and you can purchase a mystery box filled with toys. Far as I can tell these sell out pretty much every time they offer these. However from the various videos I have watched about them… they really are not worth the time or money spent on trying to get one. This leads me to believe that yes… a Mystery Box store would do exceptionally well. However it also leads me to believe that it would be a horrible value proposition for the actual consumer. The post The Mystery Store appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.