Assassin’s Creed Origins

I know I have talked briefly about this in the past, but we have been adopted by two of the neighborhood cats.  First we had the cat that we refer to as “big boy” who comes running from several yards away when he sees us come out in the morning.  He does this thing where he rears back on his hind paws to reach up and headbutt our hands and it is adorable.  He wants food of course but I think he mostly wants attention, and I take a break from the coffee and blogging time to go give it to him when my wife shouts up that he is out there.  He isn’t out every single day… but comes close to it and we know which house he belongs at and they have a doggie door so he is sorta on free roam as he likes.  He apparently visits lots of houses during the day and ours is but one stop on his trip.

Over time we developed a second cat…  that admittedly we refer to as “Two” because we are unoriginal and also have no clue where she belongs.  This cat seems way more “permanently struggling” than big boy, and over time our relationship with her has improved.  At the beginning she would run the second we got near the door…  only returning once she was sure we were no longer around.  Each day she would run away a little less…  to this morning when she did not budge at all when we opened the door and only eased away as I walked out on the porch to set down some piles of food.  I set out two piles since I know that her and big boy have a sort of uneasy truce…  but cannot be expected to eat from the same pile.

From what I can tell she lives somewhere behind our house, as often times in the morning I will come into the kitchen and our backyard light has tripped.  We have it on a motion sensor and I have looked out a few times and seen her back there and even when I have not…  often times she shows up in the front of the house as soon as we turn the porch light on.  We’ve built a little box full of blankets on the front porch in hopes of enticing her to snuggle in since it has been fairly cold of late…  but so far no luck there.  We’ve seen her hanging out on the porch and using it as a windbreak…  but no actual snuggling.

I am sure however that at some point in the next few weeks/months we will reach a point where she is comfortable enough around us to stay while we feed…  or even let us pet her.  She has been super skittish but each day feels like a tiny victory as she becomes less so.  I mean it is not like we need more cats…  given that we have three indoor ones, but we are suckers for animals that look like they need taking care of.  So as a result we now have our indoor family and our outdoor family…  and someday maybe an amalgam of the two.  For the time being however I am just trying to teach “Two” that we are pretty okay human beings that are setting this food out just for her.

On the gaming front, I am still engaged with Assassin’s Creed Origins, even though I had a bit of a fragmented night for reasons.  I didn’t get out of work until almost 6 pm which put me getting home way later than normal…  then I fixed dinner for myself and fixed dinner again for my wife when she got home around 8:30 pm.  So as a result I got a bunch of little things accomplished in the game, but didn’t move the story forward much past opening up the next sequence of targets.  I somehow doubt that those are actually the FINAL list of Targets however…  because I figure there will be a final batch after those that represent the end game.  These targets mostly seem like they serve a way to open up new areas of the game like Giza and Memphis for example.  Still having a blast, especially in the weird amalgam of Egyptian and Greek culture that are sort of mashing together.

One thing the game does a good job of is what Pete mentioned yesterday in the comments…  of showing just how insanely long the Egypt was a major world player.  The period of Egyptian dominance that we think of in the history books started in roughly 3150 BC and concluded somewhere around 332 BC…  which is 2818 years…  so yeah no wonder we are exploring ancient ruins in a game that appears to be set towards the end of the Ptolemaic period of Egypt when it is effectively ruled by the Greeks.  There are so many interesting themes going on in this game that I just sorta want to wallow in the world instead of pushing the story forward.  I’ve helped out so many random people just as a diversion from moving the needle forward.  The moment to moment gameplay feels really good and as such I am super happy to be out exploring new areas.

Last night I had to sneak my way up to the Lighthouse of Alexandria…  because I assumed there would be a leap of faith…  however it was a bit shorter than I was expecting.  I halfway expected to have one that would take me down the entire length of the tower, but instead it just deposited me at a hay pile a few stories down.  Maybe there is another post that I somehow missed on the climb up that would provide a more gratifying experience.  All in all I am still very much enjoying myself and look forward to playing it over the upcoming four day weekend.

This morning I am talking about Assassin’s Creed and there might be minor spoilers here and there. Be warned.

We’ve talked about this a bit in the past, of how in general Assassin’s Creed has not been my jam.  I tried playing the fourth game in the series on Playstation 4 and the second game on PC, and while I definitely enjoyed parts of it…  there were always missions that frustrated me… specifically the ones that involved racing awkwardly along the tops of buildings.  Assassin’s Creed Origins however I largely picked up on a whim because it looked so damned cool… and I caught it on a holiday sale a year ago.  I’ve always been a huge fan of Egypt mythology and I thought it would be cool to see what the world might have looked like at that time.  I know next to nothing about the Templar versus Assassin’s thing… other than apparently the Templar are bad guys…  which makes me a bit sad given my supposed Templar lineage.  Assassin’s being the good guys is also a bit hard to wrap my head around given that they are generally bad…  but I guess if you mostly kill evil doers you are okay.  I on the other hand have a proclivity for killing everything with a red bar and dumping the body in the bushes…  but that might just show deep character flaws in myself.

First off the game is freaking gorgeous… and of note I have been playing it exclusively through Parsec streaming off my upstairs gaming rig.  Because of that I am choosing to play at 1080p Ultra settings instead of 4k as I probably would sitting at the console upstairs, because pushing a 4k image and having it downsampled to the 1080p client causes some weirdness.  I know that it must be causing a lot more bandwidth because I end up with stutters on games that never have stutters on 1080p.  Additionally I am streaming to a laptop… and quite frankly the best it can produce is a 1080p image so there isn’t much point at all of overtaxing the machine upstairs.  All of those caveats aside it has been flawless, and playing in this manner has pretty much become my daily routine.  Granted I did go through some nonsense steps to make my connection more stable, so you have to take that into account as far as how smoothly my personal experience with Parsec has gone.

I spent my evening running through quests in both Yamu and Alexandria…  and I have to say Alexandria specifically is impressive as hell.  It might be one of the cooler cities I have experienced in a game like this… in part because it feels accurate.  I am not entirely certain how accurate it actually is, but there is a truth to the layout that transports you back to what it must have been like to live in that area at this time.  I also never really thought about how deeply mingled the Greek and Egyptian cultures must have been at that time, and the game really underlines that point.  It actually makes me really interested in continuing this journey into Odyssey, since it effectively moves the story more into the main sphere of Greek influence.  I think more than anything that was what interested me in this game was because it was placed in a setting that I wanted to feel like I was experiencing.  Sure London or Paris or whatever other locations these games have taken place in are cool…  but I have been curious about all of these places the generated the Mythologies that I loved growing up and games like this are finally allowing me to explore them.

I think more than anything the free roaming nature of the game and the ability to keep collecting interesting weapons… outfits… and mounts is going to keep me glued to it for awhile.  It really does feel like I am playing a single player MMORPG in some aspects…  but the world feels alive in spite of not actually having other players in it.  I think that is maybe something that these games have gotten better at doing, either that or I find myself craving being around other people significantly less than I used to.  I would always bounce from single player titles because they somehow felt “dead” and that I kept craving the intangible characteristic that playing a game constantly surrounded by others brought to the experience.  That said… right now I am having trouble sinking my teeth into MMORPGs at all…  so maybe that is accounting for my wanting to delve deeper into these games than I ever really did in the past.  The only negative is this does nothing to help out that New Years resolution of being more engaged socially in gaming…  but for the moment it is bringing me joy and I am just going to roll with it.

I think you can pretty much consider me hooked at this point… and much like with Far Cry 5…  I am going to see this out to the end.  That said I think the end is going to be way less cut and dried with this experience as the path seems like it is going to be considerably longer.  Last night I just completed the initial main story quest of the game, and it is clear that I am now entering a much larger world with complex interweaving story-lines.  In fact the game just gave me an achievement to underline this point called “I’m Just Getting Started”.  It has been awhile since I have played anything that I craved getting home to play some more of…  and Far Cry 5 and Assassin’s Creed Origins have both given me that feeling.  While I wish I could re-engage with Final Fantasy XIV, I am just going to go with this feeling while it lasts.