The other day I posted a New Years resolutions post of a sort, and one of the topics addressed is how I really miss the existence of a thing that I once did called “Bel Folks Stuff”. The idea was simple, that I get together with some people that I interested in and have a sit down to talk about various topics. There really wasn’t much of a format other than that, and this idea of starting it up again has been something rolling around in my brain for the last year. The original series run released starting in October of 2014 and the last episode ever produced was released in May of 2015 with a new episode releasing almost every month during that time.
I really enjoyed the series but I allowed myself to get hung up on the fact that it seemed like no one was actually listening to them. They were in theory a labor of love, with me talking to a bunch of my friends rather than seeking out industry names and trying to wrangle them for a conversation that would ultimately feel more interview that honest discourse. In theory I have reached the point where I am just not watching stats in the way I once was, and if this ends up being listened to only by a handful of people then honestly I am fine with this. I went back and listened to a few of the episodes yesterday and it was a fun trip down memory lane with me talking to some of my friends for an hour and some change each time.
In the years since 2014 I have maybe figured out how I want to proceed in this whole podcasting thing. This past weekend we recorded our 282nd episode of AggroChat and that show has shifted a bunch since the super cringe-worthy first episodes. Weirdly however I think that Bel Folks Stuff more or less still holds up so I have decided to start re-releasing them. The show is going to live as part of this blog and I will configure a section for it. The goal is going to be to start re-releasing them on Saturday since I don’t generally make a post then. I will be doing the whole show card treatment like I do with AggroChat as well as starting to upload them to YouTube.
I am going to kick the process off by recording an episode zero, that is just me talking about the goals of the show. While the early episodes didn’t have much of a structure they did have several questions that I asked pretty much all of my guests, and in similar fashion I am going to be setting up a new set of questions going forward for episodes past what has been recorded to date. In episode zero I will be essentially laying out the sales pitch for the show and answering the questions about myself.
Moving forward I am going to be sitting down and having an hour long conversation with people as often as I can seem to manage it. Then I will file these recordings away and release them as I need fresh content. I’ve cobbled together a list of about thirty people that I am going to seek out and I am sure I will be adding more people to that list as I go forward. I’m being all responsible like and using Trello for this much like how we use Trello to keep track of topics for AggroChat so I guess I legitimately mean business now about this nonsense. As I see it I have a few months before I run out of the original show run and have to start producing real content. The first series of interviews are likely going to be me sitting down with the folks from AggroChat and using them as guinea pigs before branching out into a new batch of folks.
At the end of the day this talk show of sorts was a labor of love, and as I post the old episodes I am going to try my best to do a sort of “where are they now” update in the post as to what they are up to these days. The challenge as always is going to be finding the time to sit down and talk to all of the people who are in time zones diametrically opposed to my own. I am trying to focus on doing things this year that bring me joy and this show absolutely did. I mean 2014/2015 was a better time over all in our gaming community, and maybe naively I can think I will recapture some of that magic by travelling back down this path. The other secret hope is this will be a sort of long form method of introducing the consumers of my nonsense a whole list of new people to care about.
The other day I posted a New Years resolutions post of a sort, and one of the topics addressed is how I really miss the existence of a thing that I once did called “Bel Folks Stuff”. The idea was simple, that I get together with some people that I interested in and have a sit down to talk about various topics. There really wasn’t much of a format other than that, and this idea of starting it up again has been something rolling around in my brain for the last year. The original series run released starting in October of 2014 and the last episode ever produced was released in May of 2015 with a new episode releasing almost every month during that time.
I really enjoyed the series but I allowed myself to get hung up on the fact that it seemed like no one was actually listening to them. They were in theory a labor of love, with me talking to a bunch of my friends rather than seeking out industry names and trying to wrangle them for a conversation that would ultimately feel more interview that honest discourse. In theory I have reached the point where I am just not watching stats in the way I once was, and if this ends up being listened to only by a handful of people then honestly I am fine with this. I went back and listened to a few of the episodes yesterday and it was a fun trip down memory lane with me talking to some of my friends for an hour and some change each time.
In the years since 2014 I have maybe figured out how I want to proceed in this whole podcasting thing. This past weekend we recorded our 282nd episode of AggroChat and that show has shifted a bunch since the super cringe-worthy first episodes. Weirdly however I think that Bel Folks Stuff more or less still holds up so I have decided to start re-releasing them. The show is going to live as part of this blog and I will configure a section for it. The goal is going to be to start re-releasing them on Saturday since I don’t generally make a post then. I will be doing the whole show card treatment like I do with AggroChat as well as starting to upload them to YouTube.
I am going to kick the process off by recording an episode zero, that is just me talking about the goals of the show. While the early episodes didn’t have much of a structure they did have several questions that I asked pretty much all of my guests, and in similar fashion I am going to be setting up a new set of questions going forward for episodes past what has been recorded to date. In episode zero I will be essentially laying out the sales pitch for the show and answering the questions about myself.
Moving forward I am going to be sitting down and having an hour long conversation with people as often as I can seem to manage it. Then I will file these recordings away and release them as I need fresh content. I’ve cobbled together a list of about thirty people that I am going to seek out and I am sure I will be adding more people to that list as I go forward. I’m being all responsible like and using Trello for this much like how we use Trello to keep track of topics for AggroChat so I guess I legitimately mean business now about this nonsense. As I see it I have a few months before I run out of the original show run and have to start producing real content. The first series of interviews are likely going to be me sitting down with the folks from AggroChat and using them as guinea pigs before branching out into a new batch of folks.
At the end of the day this talk show of sorts was a labor of love, and as I post the old episodes I am going to try my best to do a sort of “where are they now” update in the post as to what they are up to these days. The challenge as always is going to be finding the time to sit down and talk to all of the people who are in time zones diametrically opposed to my own. I am trying to focus on doing things this year that bring me joy and this show absolutely did. I mean 2014/2015 was a better time over all in our gaming community, and maybe naively I can think I will recapture some of that magic by travelling back down this path. The other secret hope is this will be a sort of long form method of introducing the consumers of my nonsense a whole list of new people to care about.
I continue to slowly prod my way through the Witcher 2. This was probably an excellent game when it came out in 2011, but it has not aged terribly well. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the ways that the original Mass Effect just felt outdated and a little cludgy. The prime example of this is that too many things are tied to left clicking on objects, and often times your intent gets lost in the shuffle. Left and right click are both attacks in this game, and when you are in combat that takes precedence over anything else as it probably should. However lighting torches, opening doors, and looting bodies are all also tied to the left click action meaning that you can’t do ANY of these things while in combat. In practice this also means that more or less items don’t show up as lootable until you have been out of combat for a bit, meaning you have to keep retracing your steps to make sure you didn’t miss something interesting.
A lot of these problems can be summed up as this game being built before we had somewhat agreed upon what the ideal user interface was for this sort of game. We had some of these same problems upon playing Tron 2.0 for the AggroChat game club because it had a bunch of non-standard controls from an era before “FPS Game Controls” had effectively been codified and universalized between all games. The thing that kills me the most is the absense of a standard “confirm” button or options for selecting dialog choices with number keys. This means I am constantly moving between keyboard and mouse in a deeply uncomfortable way. While you can hit Spacebar to loot all items, you can’t hit the space bar to accept a crafting prompt for example and have to instead hit the enter key, but not the one on the numpad.
Another oddity is that you can see all of your patterns that you can craft in the inventory system, but can’t actually do anything with them there. Instead there is a completely different UI that is accessed by holding down the control key and shown two screenshots above… then you have to click the center symbol to go into another menu with no hotkey available. From there you have to go into yet another menu for Alchemy which finally allows you to brew a potion or make a bomb. There is no reason why this functionality could not have been accessed off of the inventory screen since that is already loaded with a bunch of other information.
All of this just drives home how important user interface and user experience design is in a video game. We have evolved to the point of having a pretty standard template, and when a game doesn’t follow that logic it feels bad to play it. This is ultimately the biggest challenge about dipping too deeply into the back catalog of games that came out in the 2000-2012 era of games, because we were still sorta figuring out how these games should work on the PC without a controller. For all I know this might all go away and end up as a very smooth experience with a controller equipped, but that is not my default method of play and not something I naturally gravitate towards.
I am super thankful that by the time Witcher 3 rolled around all of these user experience problems had been ironed out. Yet again it is a scenario where I am hoping that eventually, much like they have started to do for Elder Scrolls Games… that someone will come through and do a mod that effectively recreates the first two games in the Witcher 3 engine. Erxv1 recreated the entire Witcher 1 Prologue for the Witcher 3 engine and it is available over on Nexus Mods. Unfortunately I am certain this took a massive amount of work, and came together largely because all of the needed assets were readily available in Witcher 3. It would take a lot more effort to recreate entire games, but god I would love to see it.
Since this is my first week back for the New Year when I am not in “holiday mode” I am starting to think about all of the assorted topics that one does at the beginning of a new year. I’ve never been very big into making New Years Resolutions, but from time to time the construct seems interesting to me. Given this is also the beginning of a new decade it seems as though it maybe has some greater importance. What I do this year may or may not set the tone for what the rest of the decade is going to look like. As such this morning I am going to share some tweaks that I would like to make in my life for the coming year.
Give Up the Chase
In the year 2000, I got indoctrinated by one of my friends into a little game called Everquest. From that point it feels like I have been chasing the one game to rule them all, or at least the one true game to devote all of my love and attention to. This has been Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Horizon, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Rift, Star Wars the Old Republic and countless other titles that I have placed upon the burden of being my prime source of entertainment. For the last two decades, the majority of my gaming time has been spent pouring resources and hours into a seemingly endless game hoping it would capture my attentions and hold them in perpetuity.
The problem here is that it never really works out and I have had a lot of amazing “honeymoon periods” with new games, in which I will pour my heart and soul for three months before wandering off disillusioned and jaded. In the Post-MMORPG world these have been games like Destiny or Anthem or even Monster Hunter World where I kept trying to make them into something that they were not necessarily intended to be. So in this coming year and decade I hope to stop looking for this magical thing that doesn’t exist. I want to allow myself to enjoy the games while they are enjoyable and fade away without guilt when they stop being that.
Stop Leading the Masses
I have this natural instinct and desire to collect awesome people and drag them along with me in whatever I happen to be doing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it has been the source of my “gaming community” for the last two decades. However going hand in hand with the first statement, I need to stop trying to make magic happen again. Everquest and World of Warcraft were moments in history that may not ever be able to be repeated. I need to stop trying to enter each new online gaming experience and try and make it into something more than it actually is. I have this bad habit of trying to “unite the clans” and get them rallied under a single banner, and then feeling super distraught and guilty when this amalgam of all of these people that I think are awesome never quite mesh together into a larger resilient community.
When we launched House Stalwart in Elder Scrolls Online we had something silly like 150 people on opening day and this was absolutely unsustainable in both just the case of human interaction or trying to make that many people exist in the same space. Then when a month later that it is down to 50 people… which is still a reasonable sized group I end up getting disappointed and frustrated that I could not somehow make everyone stick around. The binge and purge nature of new games and the guilds/clans I have built around them ends up leading to a spiral of depression and guilt that I just don’t need in my life. As a result my hope is that I can somehow stop myself from picking up that mantle of leadership in the future, because it only ends up leading to heartbreak when I can’t live up to the standards I have built up in my brain.
Play More Single Player Games
It was extremely evident when I was pulling together the list of my top games of the decade… that there are a ton of critically acclaimed games that I have never touched. Last of Us for example is by all accounts a phenomenal and game changing experience, and I have never actually played it. The reasons are many but at the end of the day I wind up getting caught up in chasing the forever game and spend all of my time in those sort of experiences rather than knocking out anything single player. I really want to somehow reverse that trend and start playing more of the games that are sitting collecting dust in my backlog that I picked up on sale at some point but never really gave the time of day.
Similarly I would also like to start finishing some of the things that I started but bounced for some reason or another. Jedi Fallen Order for example is a phenomenal game experience and I have no clue at all why I stopped playing it. I need to get back in and figure out where I left off and continue the adventure. In no particular order here are some of the games that I would like to play and or finish this calendar year.
Last of Us
Jedi Fallen Order
Wolfenstein II: New Colossus
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
Darksiders
God of War
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Cyberpunk
Dragon Age Inquisition
Red Dead Redemption 2
Sleeping Dogs
Uncharted (collection)
I realize that is a lot of things on that list and it doesn’t account for my whims but it is a goal. These are some things that I would love to spend more time playing.
Read More Books
Over the last two decades I have allowed myself to get out of the habit of reading for personal enjoyment. There are series that I am well hooked on that I will snatch up a new title for and read when it comes out like the Dresden novels, but the total volume of my reading is pretty limited. It is a weird sequence of circumstances and as I have moved away from consuming physical content as a whole… I never quite transitioned books in this direction. For awhile it was because I lacked what I considered a comfortable tablet to read on, and then when I did get that thing I wound up just playing mobile games on it before bed. With my recent obsession about the Witcher universe and trying to consume those novels I am almost rediscovering how enjoyable and relaxing knocking out a few chapters before sleep can be.
My wife is a voracious reader and over the Christmas break she consumed over twenty novels. I am nowhere near as quick or consistent as I will always prefer game time to time with a book. That is not to say that I don’t also enjoy time with a book, and it is my goal this coming year to just keep something queued and progressing. I realize I have a lot of Witcher novels in front of me, but I would also really like to read some Brandon Sanderson because it is something I have never done. I feel like I have a hefty backlog of things I know I “should” read but never got around to. I may actually start using Good Reads as a way of tracking this, just for the sake of having something easily attached to the blog.
Take Better Care of Myself
I am a fat man and will likely always be a fat man. This is just who I am as a person and I lack the desire to change that. However I need to do something because I am currently the largest I have ever been. In many ways it is keeping me from living the sort of life that I want to live. I am not entirely sure what this is going to entail but I want to make some effort to change this. I need to sit down with my wife and make some lifestyle changes in order to support this, and as a result I am being vague for the moment because I am not entirely certain what that is going to look like. I always skimp on exercise in part because I keep trying to play forever games and keep trying to make myself available to lots of different time zones worth of friends when they are available. I need to stop this and spend more time on improving me.
Go To BlizzCon
I am not sure if this is realistic this year or not, but I would like to go to a BlizzCon. I would like to experience it in person and meet up with my various long time friends who are Blizzard devotees. This coming year seems like it is going to factor heavily into Diablo 4… the Blizzard franchise that I care the most about and as a result I think I would really like to be there. Factoring into the previous statement, I need to get to a size where air travel will not be horrible for me in order to make this even a viable option. Anaheim is a really far distance away and as a result there is no reasonable option that sees me taking a road trip to get there. So contingent on the previous statement, I would love to figure out a way to make this work in November or whenever it happens to be occurring this year.
Revive Bel Folks Stuff
Several years back I had a monthly podcast where I sat down with various friends and had a dialog about things and stuff. I greatly enjoyed this process but found the scheduling to be madness and the fact that it felt like no one was actually listening ultimately caused me to stop doing this. It never really seemed to gain any sort of traction, I guess in part because it was super niche and you either new these people I cared about or you didn’t. So one of the things I have been kicking around for awhile is trying to figure out a way to revive this. Maybe record an entire season of episodes before releasing them, making it less of a stretch of trying to figure out how to schedule them. I also think I might want to shift the format to where I ask a fixed set of questions that are of course open ended enough to allow for random discussions to happen. I am not even sure this is going to happen but I figure it is worth trying to make happen. For those curious the original run can still be found on the AggroChat site, and there are seven total episodes.
