Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 539

2019 Looking Forward: Games with Release Dates

January 8, 2019 by Belghast

Over the weekend I talked a bit on the podcast about the various games that were coming out this year that I happened to be interested in. This morning I thought I would start a series where I talk about some of them here on the blog. It is a really big list so as a result I felt like I needed to break it up a bit. This morning we are starting off with the games that actually have fixed release dates… so I would say these are the MOST likely to release during the 2019 calendar year. I’m going to be talking about them in chronological order of release dates. I’m also listing the platform I am currently targeting at playing the game on.

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe – Switch – January 11th

There is so much wrong with the name of this game and it represents all of Nintendo’s jacked up naming conventions colliding at once. That said I am really looking forward to playing this on a console that I actually enjoy playing. Sure this is another repackage of a WiiU game for the Switch… but I am in support of this practice because I have no interest in actually playing my WiiU. It was not a great console… but it happened to have more than a handful of really interesting titles on it. I hope they all get the re-release treatment, because the switch is just a more versatile platform. This comes out in three days so it represents the first of the titles on the list that I am interested in.

Onimusha: Warlords – Switch – January 15th

I loved the Onimusha series on the PS2 and am super amped about this game getting a re-release. It is coming out on PC, Xbox One, PS4 and Switch… and quite honestly I am not really certain which platform I intend to pick it up on. Given that it appears to be a remaster and not a remake… I figure it is going to control like a PS2 era game which leads me down the path of favoring playing this on a console as opposed to the PC. I figure even on PC it will mostly be required to hook up a controller to be able to experience the title, so I might as well just start out on a console for the native controller experience. At this very moment I am leaning towards Switch as it gives me a wider breadth of play options.

Metro Exodus – PC – February 15th

This list is going to include a bunch of games that I am excited about… but likely won’t play at release. Metro Exodus is the first of these, largely because it is releasing in a time with a pretty packed number of releases… and a game that I way more interested is releasing a week later. I’ve come to peace with the fact that the Metro series is not in fact Russian Fallout as it originally appeared. I can live with it being a mostly on rails shooter experience, because the world is so rich and interesting. This game however supposedly opens the world up a bit giving you more freedom to roam around in the maps a bit. There is also supposedly part of the game that takes place on the literal rails… and I loved Snowpiercer. It looks really interesting so it goes on the list.

Far Cry New Dawn – PC – February 15th

This appears to be the year of neon color palette post apocalyptic games. I talked briefly about this game yesterday when I spoke of Far Cry 5, and I am still really interested to see how that setting turns into this one. This is also likely to get played way after the release date because once again it butts up against a game I am looking forward to more fervently. I feel like I might be in a kick of playing single player titles, and this is another on that fits into that list. However I still have a pretty hefty backlog of titles I have started but never finished… like Assassin’s Creed Origins and God of War… so it seriously might be a while before I try it.

Anthem – PC – February 22nd

Now for the title that is holding the last two hostage. I am super limited in what I can say about this game because NDA… but I have an awful lot of hopes riding on it. I also want to give Bioware a shot at making this work, because I feel like this might be the last chance EA gives that studio before shuttering them. I am not being hyperbolic here… EA has a proven track record of closing studios when it deems they are no longer profitable. As a new IP… it looks really interesting and I think there is going to be enough meat on these bones to satisfy the fans that cut their teeth on the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. I also think this game is angling for splitting the difference between Destiny and Warframe and creating a game that probably appeals to both tribes of players. All of those things seem really good… it just depends on how the game launches. I will be playing on PC, so if you are also planning on playing let me know. I have no clue what the Guild/Clan systems are going to be like but it would be nice to gather up a decent amount of folks for launch.

The Division 2 – PC – March 15th

Now for the first of two titles that I am really not certain about. I liked The Division for about the first twenty levels of gameplay… and then it became a slog as things started to get more serious and the mobs became more bullet-spongey and I seemed to be wearing paper thin armor. I finally reached the level cap back in October… but that was a really long ride of me bouncing out pretty regularly before I finally got there. I have not pre-ordered this game, because in truth I really want to see more of it before that happens. I was hoping I would get into an Alpha or Beta so it could win me over, but a combination of the bleak setting mixed with the third person shooter game play… it may not be the game I am looking for. That said I know a lot of people will be playing it. Ultimately whether I give this a shot depends largely on how engaged in Anthem I am just shy of a month after its launch.

Rage 2 – PC – May 14th

I feel like I am one of the few people who hold a serious candle for the original Rage. I loved everything about it… except for the fact that it felt like it simply was not finished. As you near the end of the game… I legitimately thought that we were working on a world two scenario with the game about to open up in a big way and let me explore new areas. Instead I got a credits roll… and the game was over. I THINK that the intent was to keep releasing DLC content but the poor sales of the game and the technical problems on literally all platforms… especially console… lead that plan to get scrapped. Now we get a new game and it appears to be part of the ushering in of the neon apocalypse. I am not sure if I will like this game… because I am not sure if enough of the original still lives to make me interested in it. If this ends up just being a neon mad max sim shooter… I am not entirely sure how interested I will be. I am still interested enough however for it to make the list.

What are some of the games you are looking forward to in 2019… specifically with set launch dates? Tomorrow I am likely going to talk about some of the things that are going to release… we just don’t have launch windows yet.

Far Cry 5 Thoughts so Far

January 7, 2019 by Belghast

Today is a bit of a struggle as it is the first day in a week that I am actually having to get up and around on a schedule. Traditionally I take the full two weeks off surrounding Christmas and New Years, but this year since I am now the low manager in seniority… I wound up having to work the weird and horrible partial week following Christmas. However that meant I was going to take all of my time off for the holidays in the first week of the year. I allowed myself to get way out of practice in the whole getting up at 5:30 in the morning thing… most of those days I wound up rolling out of between somewhere closer to 7 or 8. So as a result I am paying for it this morning.

Note I am going to be talking about Far Cry 5 this morning and there might be some minor spoilers. Going to try and stay away from a lot of the specifics, but I have to say some things to explain the shape of the narrative.

The Video Game Awards produced a shocking number of announcements that made me greatly interested in some of the games coming out. One of those was Far Cry: New Dawn which is a post apocalyptic game set in the same setting as Far Cry 5. This intrigued me greatly given that as far as I am aware… the Far Cry series has never actually made a direct sequel to any of their games. They’ve had several cases of the same game using the engine from the previous title… aka Far Cry 3 and Far Cry Blood Dragon and Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal. Far Cry 5 had been on the list of games that I wanted to play since I saw the initial trailers, but I never picked it up because I always had other things to play. Over the break I caught a sale and wound up grabbing it and have been playing a silly amount of the game. It’s weird that the thought of a sequel was what ultimately pushed me into gear to get going with playing it.

The elevator pitch for Far Cry 5 is that it is set in Hope County Montana, and draws heavily on the history of various religious cults that we have had here in the United States. The game centers around one such Cult that has a home base of operations in the Montana country side called Project Edens Gate. Instead of worshiping the Bible, they worship something they call the Book of Joseph… which was written by Joseph Seed the man the cultists refer to as The Father. He has predicted a collapse of society, and when you are called upon to serve a warrant to arrest him on Kidnapping charges that signals the opening events of his prophecy. You barely escape the compound and are now a hunted man… as the Project Edens Gate… or Peggies as the locals call them… swarm out capturing everything in the Valley.

You have the set up for a game that works pretty much like so many other games where you are the opposition to a larger force… your job is now to destroy the foothold the cult has on the area and save as many locals as you can in the process. The game is divided up into a bunch of sections, as each one of the “children” of Joseph Seed act as lieutenants over a different region of the valley. I wound up going after John Seed, in part because it felt like the game was directing me there… and the person he was holding was the one I was most interested in saving. As you take actions against the regional “boss” you raise a resistance meter, and every third of that bar there is a stopping point that triggers a specific event that plays out. By the time I reached the conclusion of this “zone” of the game I had successfully worked up quite the hatred for John Seed, and wanted to see him die.

Which admittedly plays in really nicely to the narrative of the game. My sin is that of Wrath, and as you tear through wave after wave of brain washed cultists… you start to think about that specifically. I love killing baddies in games, but in truth… I am the embodiment of Wrath each time that occurs. The final fight unfortunately is one of the most frustrating I have ever encountered in a game, largely because it centers around a dog fight. While I enjoy flying planes in Far Cry 5… the controls themselves do not lend themselves to aerial combat. There are a couple of options here… you can hire one of the townsfolk to be your wing man and let them get the killing shot. If you are far enough in the game you can buy a heat seeking rocket launcher and take him out that way… or you can go the route I did and purchase the attack helicopter which is way the hell more maneuverable in the air for fighting. Thankfully at that point in the game I had a lot of cash and had unlocked the Helicopter shop.

The best part about the game however is that you get to run around… if you choose… with Boomer that dog. He is so much better than any of the human options when it comes to your partners… because firstly he alerts you to any trouble that might be ahead. Secondly he retrieves stuff from the bodies that you kill along the way, meaning that other than cash you don’t have to be quite so concerned about making sure you loot every single body that drops. You are going to be killing a lot of people in this game and as a result producing copious amounts of bodies that you have to painstakingly loot. The dog short cuts a lot of that, and unlike some of the other companions he rarely gets in the way of what you are actually trying to accomplish. The game has a photo mode and I used it in the above shot to focus in on the good boy that I am regularly running around with.

I think the most interesting thing about the game so far is how familiar it feels to me. I grew up in very humble and very rural roots. I came from a town of 2000 and graduated in a class of 60… while that was Oklahoma and this is Montana… there is a shocking bit of detail that stays exactly the same no matter what rural environment you are traversing. The people remind me so much of people that I knew growing up, so I have to give massive credit to Ubisoft for getting that feel completely dead on. Even the cultist thing feels a little familiar as we had a local Want-To-Be-Megachurch Preacher that paid kids to attend church service in the form of scholarships. The amount you got was a formula based upon how many services you attended and how many other kids you recruited to the fold. So sure it wasn’t a dooms day cult, but it felt no less creepy. Essentially I relate to this game and setting way more than I ever have in the Far Cry settings, and I am looking forward to getting home tonight and starting another area.

Great game so far, but unfortunately given the release window for Anthem of February 22nd… I doubt I will be playing New Dawn the sequel when it releases on February 15th. Tomorrow I am probably going to talk some about the games that are coming out in 2019 that I am looking forward to… but if you want a preview we talked about it at length during the podcast this weekend.

Seasonal Light Cap Get

January 3, 2019 by Belghast

As promised yesterday, today we return at least for a bit to proper gaming news… or more so the news of the gaming I have been up to over the break. I’ve been spending a significant amount of time playing Destiny 2 which is not terribly shocking. That said I did manage to hit 650 light, the current cap for the rest of the current season and even have managed to push up my standard loadout of Breakneck, Ikelos Shotgun and Thunderlord to that level as well. Now begins the slow process of bringing the other things I care about up to that level as well.

I also managed to get my Hunter to 50 and have finished the Warmind content now and am slowly chewing my way through Forsaken. I’ve swapped over 650 weapons and am using them to slowly push up her light level which I have managed to get to 625 in a day of trying to do this. I will probably be spending a good deal more time working on her than the Titan seeing as I hit my initial goal of hitting the light cap during the break. At some point I will probably also start working on pushing up the Warlock, but seeing as that is my least favorite class to play… it always ends up lagging behind significantly.

The core problem I am having with Destiny 2 is a pretty good one to be having. There is more content to do each week than I have time to really do it in. At launch time I could push through all of the powerful gear options in a single night, and could easily run out of things that I felt were “worth doing”… and as a result spent a good deal of time working on alts to spread out that list of things to do enough to get me through the week. With the current state of the game there is no way I have enough time to do all of the things that could create progress so instead I just focus on the things I feel like doing in a given night. I am leaving so much progression on the table in a given week that I am having to learn to be okay with it.

Lastly I have been tooling around with a weird Dark-Soulsian game called Ashen that is currently only available on Xbox One and the Epic Games store. Once you get over the fact that all of the characters are faceless poppets, the game does a much better job of making you care about the world that you are exploring in the fact that you are essentially recovering after an apocalypse. As you roam around you meet new people that you can help and in turn they join the village that you are building. They start to offer you whatever it is that they can do from forging weapons to letting you futz with your stat layout.

There are times the game reminds me of Breath of the Wild as well… albeit with way more hardcore combat. It is very easy to die in this game as pretty much everything in the world hates you. This can get a little frustrating because in my rush to attack before they can attack me… I have accidentally killed a few NPCs. I am enjoying myself quite a bit, but I am not really playing it anywhere near as much as some of the other games I have on my plate. I still thought it was worth mentioning in case anyone else was interested. They have managed to create a game that is very much in the Dark Souls genre… that is also very hopeful and not quite so soul crushing. I linked to the original trailer above.

Hopes for the New Year

January 2, 2019 by Belghast

I’ve started this post a half dozen times this morning only to keep backspacing it away. So as a result I am just going to go with it as not to waste anymore time. I am not used to blogging while sitting downstairs, and I think that might be harshing some of my mojo. Either than or the fact that I am effectively writing the first blog post of 2019, a new year… and don’t want to mess things up. Regardless this morning I thought I would write a bit about some of my thoughts for the coming year. I am not generally one to do resolutions, so I am going to participate in the practice without actually calling them that. So here goes some of the things I hope for the next year.

Figure out Discord

I know this sounds like a silly topic, but I am being completely serious. No I am not meaning figure it out in a technical sense, but instead figure out how it fits in my life. Right now I am legitimately in fifty different discord servers, and have probably since its launch left about that many as well. Hell there are a half dozen that I set up myself for various reasons. This fragmentation means that I end up using none of them on a regular basis. While I use Slack and Microsoft Teams for work purposes… and that gave me a fixed reason to use the social Slacks I am in… I don’t have a similar need for Discord other than when I am wanting to use voice chat for some reason. As such we have a bunch of general purpose discords that serve as a ready voice chat option when we need one.

All of that said there are awesome people and interesting conversations going on there, and I would like during this new year to figure out how to become part of that. I’ve been pleased to see the Blaugust discord is still active, and I love hanging out with the Moogle’s Pom crew when I remember it is a place that exists. Unfortunately I think discord has way too much noise to really make it a constant destination. Too many people are scattered among too many different servers to have it feel like a cohesive experience. I think the other challenge is everyone is struggling to figure out how exactly to use it. Every single alpha that I am in wants to use it as their primary means of communication and as a replacement for the traditional forum experience. The UI doesn’t exactly help to identify what are things I actually should be reading, and what is just so much more spam.

It would be nice if there was a way to group servers into folders… so you could have a half dozen ones that you regularly use and then the rest neatly hidden behind a wall. This is a problem that I want to solve this year but I am not even sure where to start apart from simply leaving every server I am in and adding them back more judiciously.

Get Over Anxiety Tanking

I am not sure where it came from but lately I have been super anxious about getting back into tanking again. This is a big part of why I have been largely bouncing from Final Fantasy XIV is that I cannot seem to get over the hurdle of just tanking for randoms. That is what I need to do so I can get the currency I need to upgrade my gear to be able to run the dungeons to be able to finish the main story line. Yes I realize that was one hell of a run on sentence but I absolutely did that on purpose. Everything in that game seems to be gated by something, and the answer to all of it is just to tank queue as a Warrior and be done with it.

That said I keep logging in, playing the cactpot and then logging right back out. I think a lot of why I have not returned to World of Warcraft in earnest with the recent patch is that I have a similar wall that has built up against the responsibility of tanking. I want to figure out a way past this so I can get on with my life and start to enjoy MMORPGs again.

Organize My Vault

Another huge problem I am having with Final Fantasy XIV is that I am avoiding my inventory. I have six retainers full of shit and I cannot begin to figure out how to sort it all. I know there is a good deal of it that I can stick in the glamour chest and be done with it, but I am so paralyzed by the mountain of items that it is effecting my willingness to go do anything that might add more to it. I am similarly having an issue with Destiny 2 where I am running out of vault room. I need to go through and get rid of everything that I can buy back again through the collections… but right now I am willfully avoiding touching anything. I am struggling with an irrational fear that I might remove the wrong thing and with no undo system and no buyback vendor… I could accidentally get rid of something I can’t get back.

Quite honestly so many of the things I am dealing with are anxiety based… anxiety over interacting with people, anxiety over responsibility, and anxiety over possible loss. If I could figure out a way to solve that core problem a lot of these would disappear.

Figure Out Streaming

Another one of these anxiety triggered things is the fact that I would like to stream more… but always struggle to push that “go live” button. I think one of the big problems is that a lot of what I do on a nightly basis does not exactly make for “must see television”. I don’t play the type of games that lend themselves to streaming, because in a narrative experience… the fact that I am streaming seems to get in the way. Additionally does anyone actually want to see me grind public events in Destiny 2 for an entire night? I would love to come to terms with this and figure out a way to work it into my life.

Figure Out Social Media

As it stands I follow way the fuck too many people on Social Media and I have been paralyzed to start trying to tackle this problem. On Twitter I follow just shy of 1200 people and that is way too many to make it usable. Similarly I have allowed my Mastodon profile to balloon up to 226…. which means I am setting myself up for the same sort of problem there in the future. Again like so many of these I need to take the hard step and just start slashing those follow numbers, because it is completely unsustainable the way it is now. There is no way in hell that I can actually interact with that many people. Twitter vacillates between being extremely enjoyable and being a wall of noise that I cannot seem to push past. I need to figure out how to reduce the noise.

I have not done this thing because I have not been willing to risk upsetting some people in the process. I need to get over that and rip the band aid off.

Minimize

A lot of this has been about gaming or social media… but this one is more personal. I have reached a point where I am larger than I have been at any point in my life. I will never be a small person, but I need to be less big. So this year I need to get back on the wagon and reduce my calorie intake while also increasing my exercise output. I’ve done this numerous times in the past and I need to do it again. The problem is something will happen in my life that causes me to stop giving a fuck about it… and then this happens. Caring about my weight is not my default state, it is something I have to work at caring about. So this year I need to devote serious effort into fixing this before it gets worse.

Tomorrow I will return to games blogging, since the last few posts have been more on the personal and serious side… but I wanted to get them out of me as they appear to have needed to be written.