Accounts all Happy and LInked Up
First up this morning I am going to talk a bit about Bungie account linking and the Battle.net to Steam transfer process. Largely I am going through the motions here just in case someone out there has not been following the news related to Destiny 2 for some time. Bungie is divorcing Activision and part of the terms of the divorce is that they will be moving the PC version of Destiny 2 away from Activision Blizzard owned Battle.net. The new partner for account information will be Steam, a thing we all pretty much already have. However the data from Battle.net needs to be linked up and copied to your Steam account.
As a result yesterday they opened up the process for doing this. I tweeted out the link yesterday but you need to go to Bungie.net and use the PC Move tool. Effectively this will walk you through the process of logging into a Battle.net account, verifying your characters and such that are owned by that account, logging in a Steam account, and finally verifying that everything is appearing on the Steam entitlement screen. It took me a few minutes and now Steam shows up in the list of accounts that I have linked. The truth is I am largely okay with this move because the integration with Battle.net never worked quite as smoothly as I would have liked it to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MspAKr8THf4
Next up in the “things I think are cool” department. With Gamescom comes a bunch of new trailers, and this time we have one for Shadowkeep showing off the finisher moves. This is something new going into Destiny 2 and seem to be similar to the finishing moves in Doom 2016. Essentially when an enemy gets low enough you can perform a special melee attack with its own unique animation and punch/kick/whatever the monster to death. The bad bit is that the cosmetic versions of these will be Eververse exclusive, but the mods you can associate with them that do things like spawn heavy ammo will be gained through gameplay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8mC5GaDoyQ
Next up we got a trailer for the first post-Shadowkeep Season, this time seemingly focused on the Vex and the Black Garden. I still think the Vex are one of the cooler enemies we fight, and I’ve always thought it cool that the radiolarian fluid that you see come out of them when you kill one is a sentient hive being of a sort. There are some rumors floating around as to why we are going back to the Black Garden, but in truth I don’t really care. I am just happy to see Bungie slowly clawing back locations that only appeared in Destiny 1 and putting them in Destiny 2. Next step… I want to see them simply recreate the Destiny 1 experience inside of Destiny 2 and rebrand the whole thing to simply being “Destiny”.
Can we just admit to ourselves at least that nothing is anywhere as exciting as a video game hype person seems to make it out to be?
— Belghast Ten Years of Nonsense (@belghast) August 19, 2019
The other day I posted what was largely a throwaway tweet while watching part of the Gamescom Xbox show. It featured some of the most hyperbolic pitch folks I have ever seen, that were fake levels of excitement about every little thing that was being announced. That level of forced hype really is a turn off, which is sad because once I was able to get past that there were a bunch of cool things that they talked about. So I find myself wondering… how did I get into this state where I almost feel allergic to hype? E3 2019 was largely a disappointment, and what I have seen from Gamescom could be thrown in a similar category.
Is it just that I am gunshy from being burned so many times? I mean I poured my heart in soul into Anthem and largely found a really great game… but one that stopped being great after you burned through the initial story-line. That said I think the Anthem reveal at E3 several years back was the last time I was fully on board with a staged demo selling me on the notion of what the game might be like. It might just be that I have reached a point where I am skeptical about anything that is being announced, because while I lead this off with talk about Destiny 2 and the fact that it is in a pretty great place… it has taken them three years of ups and downs to get to that place.
I think a whole other side of this is just the sheer concern of not knowing where I will find the time to play even half of the things that I am vaguely interested in. I already feel like I have a crushing back log pushing down on me of games that I really feel like I should be playing for various reasons. Then just looking ahead I have no clue how I am going to navigate all of the release dates. I just assembled this quick list which is in no way complete… but represents some of the bullet points on my radar for the rest of 2019.
World of Warcraft Classic – August 27th
Monster Hunter World Iceborne – September 6th
Borderlands 3 – September 13th
Destiny 2 Shadowkeep / Season of the Undying – October 1st
The Outer Worlds – October 25th
Death Stranding – November 8th
Jedi Fallen Order – November 15th
Pokemon Sword and Shield November 15th
Doom Eternal – November 22nd
There is a part of me that wonders if my challenge getting hyped about things coming down the pipe is a defense mechanism seeing as I know that I don’t have time to play all of the things I already want to play, and then for the rest of the year at a minimum of every other week something new is being released that I also really want to play. I have no clue how I am going to juggle all of this, and as a result I am just wondering if my brain is throwing up blinders and screaming at me that enough is enough.
The level of excitement that I feel however seems to be hampered as well. Like yesterday I wrote about my love of Black Isle/Obsidian and everything I have seen about The Other Worlds seems like a return to the best of what I love from them… Fallout New Vegas. However I am finding it really challenging to muster more than a mild sense of excitement about it. My brain is stuck in a mode where I am trying to figure out how I will juggle my schedule to find the time to really devote a weekend or two to exploring it.
Maybe I am just broken. Whatever the case though I really don’t want my ramblings to harsh the excitement someone else is feeling about it. My twitter comment really was meant as a sort of throwaway reaction, but maybe I need to watch those more closely. I don’t want to come off as a bitter old man, but maybe on some level that is what I am? It sucks. I want to feel child like joy when I watch a games presentation again. I miss having E3 or BlizzCon or any other major show to feel like Christmas morning.
Accounts all Happy and LInked Up
First up this morning I am going to talk a bit about Bungie account linking and the Battle.net to Steam transfer process. Largely I am going through the motions here just in case someone out there has not been following the news related to Destiny 2 for some time. Bungie is divorcing Activision and part of the terms of the divorce is that they will be moving the PC version of Destiny 2 away from Activision Blizzard owned Battle.net. The new partner for account information will be Steam, a thing we all pretty much already have. However the data from Battle.net needs to be linked up and copied to your Steam account.
As a result yesterday they opened up the process for doing this. I tweeted out the link yesterday but you need to go to Bungie.net and use the PC Move tool. Effectively this will walk you through the process of logging into a Battle.net account, verifying your characters and such that are owned by that account, logging in a Steam account, and finally verifying that everything is appearing on the Steam entitlement screen. It took me a few minutes and now Steam shows up in the list of accounts that I have linked. The truth is I am largely okay with this move because the integration with Battle.net never worked quite as smoothly as I would have liked it to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MspAKr8THf4
Next up in the “things I think are cool” department. With Gamescom comes a bunch of new trailers, and this time we have one for Shadowkeep showing off the finisher moves. This is something new going into Destiny 2 and seem to be similar to the finishing moves in Doom 2016. Essentially when an enemy gets low enough you can perform a special melee attack with its own unique animation and punch/kick/whatever the monster to death. The bad bit is that the cosmetic versions of these will be Eververse exclusive, but the mods you can associate with them that do things like spawn heavy ammo will be gained through gameplay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8mC5GaDoyQ
Next up we got a trailer for the first post-Shadowkeep Season, this time seemingly focused on the Vex and the Black Garden. I still think the Vex are one of the cooler enemies we fight, and I’ve always thought it cool that the radiolarian fluid that you see come out of them when you kill one is a sentient hive being of a sort. There are some rumors floating around as to why we are going back to the Black Garden, but in truth I don’t really care. I am just happy to see Bungie slowly clawing back locations that only appeared in Destiny 1 and putting them in Destiny 2. Next step… I want to see them simply recreate the Destiny 1 experience inside of Destiny 2 and rebrand the whole thing to simply being “Destiny”.
Can we just admit to ourselves at least that nothing is anywhere as exciting as a video game hype person seems to make it out to be?
— Belghast Ten Years of Nonsense (@belghast) August 19, 2019
The other day I posted what was largely a throwaway tweet while watching part of the Gamescom Xbox show. It featured some of the most hyperbolic pitch folks I have ever seen, that were fake levels of excitement about every little thing that was being announced. That level of forced hype really is a turn off, which is sad because once I was able to get past that there were a bunch of cool things that they talked about. So I find myself wondering… how did I get into this state where I almost feel allergic to hype? E3 2019 was largely a disappointment, and what I have seen from Gamescom could be thrown in a similar category.
Is it just that I am gunshy from being burned so many times? I mean I poured my heart in soul into Anthem and largely found a really great game… but one that stopped being great after you burned through the initial story-line. That said I think the Anthem reveal at E3 several years back was the last time I was fully on board with a staged demo selling me on the notion of what the game might be like. It might just be that I have reached a point where I am skeptical about anything that is being announced, because while I lead this off with talk about Destiny 2 and the fact that it is in a pretty great place… it has taken them three years of ups and downs to get to that place.
I think a whole other side of this is just the sheer concern of not knowing where I will find the time to play even half of the things that I am vaguely interested in. I already feel like I have a crushing back log pushing down on me of games that I really feel like I should be playing for various reasons. Then just looking ahead I have no clue how I am going to navigate all of the release dates. I just assembled this quick list which is in no way complete… but represents some of the bullet points on my radar for the rest of 2019.
World of Warcraft Classic – August 27th
Monster Hunter World Iceborne – September 6th
Borderlands 3 – September 13th
Destiny 2 Shadowkeep / Season of the Undying – October 1st
The Outer Worlds – October 25th
Death Stranding – November 8th
Jedi Fallen Order – November 15th
Pokemon Sword and Shield November 15th
Doom Eternal – November 22nd
There is a part of me that wonders if my challenge getting hyped about things coming down the pipe is a defense mechanism seeing as I know that I don’t have time to play all of the things I already want to play, and then for the rest of the year at a minimum of every other week something new is being released that I also really want to play. I have no clue how I am going to juggle all of this, and as a result I am just wondering if my brain is throwing up blinders and screaming at me that enough is enough.
The level of excitement that I feel however seems to be hampered as well. Like yesterday I wrote about my love of Black Isle/Obsidian and everything I have seen about The Other Worlds seems like a return to the best of what I love from them… Fallout New Vegas. However I am finding it really challenging to muster more than a mild sense of excitement about it. My brain is stuck in a mode where I am trying to figure out how I will juggle my schedule to find the time to really devote a weekend or two to exploring it.
Maybe I am just broken. Whatever the case though I really don’t want my ramblings to harsh the excitement someone else is feeling about it. My twitter comment really was meant as a sort of throwaway reaction, but maybe I need to watch those more closely. I don’t want to come off as a bitter old man, but maybe on some level that is what I am? It sucks. I want to feel child like joy when I watch a games presentation again. I miss having E3 or BlizzCon or any other major show to feel like Christmas morning.
Destiny 2 – PC
The first goal of the night was to finish up my purple armor set for the Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. Over the weekend I had knocked out everything but the EAZ minibosses component, and I largely stopped there because I knew given yesterdays patch the requirement was being lowered to 50. I was sitting at 56 so my hope was that it would be as simple as logging in, equipping all of the gear and meditating in front of the statue.
What I did not expect was that all of the gear would be 750, which was a nice boost in item level. I just need to get some powerful items to bump things up on the weapon front to 750 as well. The funny thing is… I will probably be farming EAZ over the next few weeks to try and get slightly better perks on each of the armor slots. As it stands the Helm is ideal for the way I play, but all of the other items could use some work. I opened the rest of the boxes I had in my inventory and picked up four additional pieces of the purple majestic armor.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
With the first goal knocked out quickly, I moved on to the second goal of the night which was getting the last little bit of a level on the Samurai and hitting 80. I opted for the short queue of a Trials roulette and got quite possibly the easiest option: Cape Westwind. It legitimately takes longer for the new player to watch the cutscene than it does to kill the boss, so we hung out chatting while waiting on the fight to start. Upon dinging 80 I equipped whatever gear I happened to have available and managed to get my item level up to 425.
From there I picked back up with the 74 Physical DPS Role quest, thinking the easiest and fastest way to gear would be completing the quest and getting the 430 gear from the smithy. It took some time though to chew through the remaining 74, 76, 78 and 80 quests so this consumed the majority of my play time last night. However I have now unlocked a second role and have access to physical dps gear. I wound up buying the 450 crafted blade, so I am now sitting at 435 which is enough to be able to dps Eden. Now that I am getting back into the swing of tanking a roulette or two each night, I should be able to bolster that level with tomestone gear.
World of Warcraft – PC
Finally I spent the last hour or so catching up on the War Campaign quest series given that it appears to be the most coherent manner to catch up on story. I think I underestimated just how much story content had gone into the game since I left, because I keep chewing away at it and seem to be not actually making any headway. I started last night queuing for the pieced of the raid finder that involves the Jaina battle seeing as I needed that for the War Campaign. That was a fun fight overall, but I am not sure how I would feel about the middle section where as horde we are forced to fight Rastakhan? I like Rastakhan a lot.
I think for the forseeable future I will be poking my way along these three different paths of catching up on World of Warcraft in getting back into the swing of the game prior to the launch of Classic. Then working on various objectives in Destiny 2 and probably leveling a healer in Final Fantasy XIV. It has been enjoyable to play for an hour or so and then swap to something fresh and new. It has also been nice hanging out and talking to my friends in Facepull once again.
I’ve decided to try a new series of sorts called “Weekend Update” (name shamelessly stolen from SNL) since my Monday morning post tends to just be a rundown of what happened over the weekend. Right now it feels like I have a bunch of competing projects that I have theoretically been juggling reasonably well. At the very least they all appear to be making progress at the same time, which is I guess the master plan behind the juggling.
One of them has been getting a second 80 in Final Fantasy XIV, and this process has largely involved me logging in every day and running the Main Story Roulette. This means that I have seen an awful lot of the cut-scenes surrounding Praetorium and Castrum Meridianum. While it isn’t the same voice actor… every time I hear a Gaius cutscene it reminds me of Dracula from Symphony of the Night. I seem to be the only one because when I type “what is man but a miserable pile of secrets” in party chat I just get confused responses.
As of last night I am just a sliver into 79 and have been taking this opportunity to clean up a bunch of the side quests that I never got around to doing. I’ve finished cleaning up the Dwarven and related areas in upstate Kholusia. I moved over after that to the secret zone that you end up at around 79, and it has a ton of quests to knock out. In theory if I pull another Praetorium I might luck out and get close enough to 80 to be able to ding off of a Trials roulette or something similar. Then begins the process of doing a bunch of dungeon grinding to gear it!
Destiny 2 – PC
On the Destiny 2 front I have reached a point where I just can’t bring myself to push any further. During this weeks TWAB, it was announced that they were lowering the total number of EAZ Miniboss kills from 100 to 50. This means in theory if I just wait for the Tuesday patch, I can log in that night and get my purple armor set without a bunch of mindless grinding. As a result I have spent my time either working on the Hunter to get her the blue set, or working on various other things I have neglected like the loaded question quest. This is why I am rocking a double fusion rifle loadout above.
After I upgrade the armor I will need to sort out what exactly I can do as far as the masterwork quests. However I have heard that these will be something you could complete after the Solstice event is over. I don’t really want to risk it however so I am going to try and knock out what I can while it is going on.
World of Warcraft – PC
I don’t have a proper explanation for this one. I had not logged in since October of last year and then suddenly this weekend I found myself patching my addons up and logging into what had been my main when I was last actively playing. One of the things that I dislike about World of Warcraft when you are several patches behind, is that there is no real way of knowing what content you should be doing short of scouring WoWhead. The main story quest is a point of frustration for a lot of people in Final Fantasy XIV, but I love that there is zero risk of me doing things out of sequence.
I absolutely blindly accepted the quest that the game was trying to send me to… and apparently unlocked Nazjatar instead of all of the content I had seemingly missed between now and then. I guess this makes sense from a World of Warcraft perspective because it is a game that is constantly abandoning what has come before for the new and shiny future. I am going to blame this on the fact that we spent a lot of time this weekend talking about WoW Classic, and on that front we are going to be rolling Horde side on the PVE RP server Bloodsail Buccaneers. If you have interest in this nonsense let me know.