Good morning friends. When I sat down and decided to take a bit of a break I didn’t expect that a fortnight would pass before I put virtual pen to paper and start posting again. The weirdest thing about the entire experience is that I expected there would be this massive drop off in readership… yet for the most part my data stayed pretty normal. I figured eventually people would give up on me and forget that I existed, but that does not appear to be the case. I am not entirely certain if this means I am returning to my normal daily routine or if I will ultimately modify it slightly to be a little more forgiving.
Whatever the case I guess I am back and functional, but to be honest I am no less stressed now than I was when I ultimately decided to disappear. Part of that last bit might be because today is my first day back to work after having been off for a full week. During that week I allowed myself to get royally out of synchronization with my normal sleep schedule and as a result 5:30 this morning was a painful mess, as was attempting to get to sleep before midnight. Today will be hell but hopefully I readjust quickly to the normal routine.
I spent most of my break hanging out on the sofa remoted into my upstairs machine via Parsec and snuggling with cats. This is a pretty damned good existence if you ask me, and I would happily be on the sofa right now were it not for that whole need to be working thing. I played an excessive amount of Cyberpunk 2077 and love it so much… which seems to be counter to the wider opinion of the game for various valid reasons. I beat the game on one ending and started a second, and as a result I likely have a long form post in my breaking down my thoughts about the game as a whole. This morning is not that post however.
Another thing that I did over the break was to restart Jedi Fallen Order since around this time last year I stalled out on Kashyyyk. I originally played the game with a controller and this time around I decided to make the switch to mouse and keyboard which greatly improved my personal enjoyment. The problem with Jedi Fallen Order is it is not exactly clear in its directions of where you should be going… and when I stalled out the first time it was because I had misunderstood the games subtle hints that it was time for me to leave the planet. I probably have a lot of thoughts to share about this game experience, but again… that this not necessarily this mornings post.
I made an attempt to play Red Dead Redemption II, and this is the point where I have realized that I just don’t like Rockstar Games. I’ve “attempted” to play Grand Theft Auto before, but never really got into it and playing RDR2 made me realize why. GTA and RDR both give you the illusion that the game world is this massive open place for you to wander around in… however the second you start a mission you are forced onto a narrow track essentially closing in the walls of that open world into a fixed corridor where the mission actually takes place. Instead of getting a quest asking you to gather 3 animal pelts, you are instead placed on a specific mission where you and another character go out in the woods together and hunt those animal pelts.
A game like Witcher 3 or even a Farcry game gives you broad objectives and doesn’t much care what order you complete them in or even when you actually get around to them. This allows you to stack up objectives similar to that of an MMORPG and do multiple things while in the same location. This feels way more natural to me than starting a specific mission that has hard constraints on what you can and cannot do during it. This means that if you are on a stealth mission… you have to be stealthy or you meet a fail condition unlike the more open world genre where going loud causes problems… but if you can deal with those problems you don’t have to sneak about. I just think the Rockstar model may not be for me.
Speaking of games that give me a play style I am more comfortable with… I also played a lot of Ghost of Tsushima and realized I am WAY further from the end of this game than I realized. Additionally the PS5 does a much better job of smoothly streaming a game remotely than the base PS4 did. I am nearing the end of Act 1 and there are 3 Acts in total. I’ve been spending most of my time wandering the country side and challenging Mongols to duels. I now have the perk that allows me to take out three encounters at once when I do a Stand Off, which is still one of the coolest mechanics for this sort of game that I have seen. When I realized this was not a game that I would likely be able to wrap up over the break, I returned to my leisurely pace of knocking out a few objectives and then walking away for awhile.
Last but not least… I seem to have fallen back into the nostalgia of Fallout New Vegas. During a lot of my conversation about Cyberpunk 2077, I compared it to this game and as a result it probably isn’t a massive shock that I would ultimately pick it up and start playing again. Now that I am engaged I am more than likely going to complete this playthrough. The hardest part about Fallout New Vegas to be honest is getting all of the mods installed that make this decade old game look fairly viable. You can also blame this video by HBomberguy that triggered all of the emotions and feels.
Finally I leave you all with this video that my friend Cylladora sent me over the break. It is amazing… true… and also sad. I hope you had an excellent break and for those of you still out there, thanks for sticking around. It might be a few weeks while I sort out what my normal pattern is going to look like. I have a bunch of topics for the next bit as I go through all of the end of the gear stuff. I also want to do a deep dive into Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi Fallen Order after having beaten both recently. So I have some ammunition for several weeks, but when that runs out… I might allow myself another break because it seems to have at least improved my desire to sit down and write.
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War Never Changes…. and neither does Fallout, and that is a statement I mean in the best possible way. When a sequel to a beloved franchise is released, you never quite know if you are going to get absolute greatness like Skyrim… or if you are going to be stuck with a Master of Orion 3. For those who loved MOO3 I apologize… but that game was horrible and broke from far too many of the tenets of the original franchise. Fallout 4 however… keeps all of the best features from Fallout 3 and New Vegas… and applies a next generation coat of paint and features to it. If you have been an aficionado of Bethesda games for very long you will notice that several of the really nice features of Skyrim have been implemented into this engine. Everything from the loading screen item previews… to the ability to favorite weapons and swap between them quickly in combat… are direct lineage to Skyrim. What you also get is some genuine evolution of the engine, in the form of just how content dense the world is and how much of it can be fiddled with.
At this point according to Steam I am roughly four hours into the game, and I have to say… that was the fastest four hours of my life. I mentioned yesterday that I did not stay up Tuesday night to play the game, but instead had to wait until after work yesterday. Additionally we have contractors coming to the house to put a door in our bedroom today… so we had to do a lightning round of cleaning before I finally got to sit down and play with my precious. From the moment I set down… every time I was aware that time had passed… it was an hour and not fifteen minutes like I had thought. Most of that time was spent not actively doing any quests or following the story line really. The first handful of events happen to play out in a pretty organic fashion, and I apparently followed the story line to a point… without really meaning to. I remember watching the demo footage from E3, and I have for the most part made it through the sequence that they showed… which happens pretty early in the game. It gives you a neatly framed vignette that allows you to understand some of the forces in the world that you are contending with.
Packrat Friendly
For me at least the best part of this game is that they have taken things to essentially their logical conclusions. If you are living in a world with limited resources, then essentially everything you come across could be useful. In the past I was a horrible packrat and constantly on the brink over being overburdened. Why was I carrying fifty coffee mugs…. who knew… but I might need them someday. Those tendencies are absolutely paid off in full in this game because quite literally every piece of crap you find in the world is useful either to modify your weapons and armor… or to construct things for the new base building side game. Pretty early on, you end up in the neighborhood you once lived in. This then becomes your base of operations allowing you to scrap materials there, and build new structures. As you venture out into the world you find survivors that you can invite back to your little sanctuary, and in a fashion very reminiscent to State of Decay you have to watch after their well being and their defenses. I am assuming as your settlement gets bigger you will become the target of raiders and the like trying to take your hard earned resources.
The other big noticeable change in this game is that everything seems more dangerous. Radiation is a real problem this time, because instead of causing you to lose health over time… it reduces your maximum health pool. All of the old baddies are also more deadly… Bloat Flies move more erratically, Mole Rats can burrow under ground and pop up when you least expect them…. and move insanely fast… and there are new dangerous like giant mutated mosquitoes. All of this and more I have encountered within a short radius of where you actually start the game. Everything I am talking about is within visual distance of the Vault 111 entrance. Essentially this is a game that is going to eat every waking moment for a long while… because right now I feel like I have not even begun to unwrap the wrapping of the game… let alone actually dip below the surface. The big takeaway is that it is the Fallout game play that you either love or hate… with more advanced systems and more fluidity of character movement and actions. Everything “feels better” and I know this largely because I played quite a bit of New Vegas Tuesday night as a sort of placebo for Fallout 4 while waiting on it to unlock. The changes are extremely noticeable, even from the level the engine was at during Skyrim. I’m now going to shut up about my impressions… and launch the game and lose myself in it again.
This week we once again have the full AggroChat crew, and a long list of things to discuss. The challenge with every episode however is always coming up with a title, and this weeks honor goes to a lengthy discussion we happened to have about the new rune system in Wildstar. We could however just as easily given this a Star Wars title because we spent a huge chunk of the game discussing various pieces of that universe as well between Star Wars the Old Republic, Battlefront, X-Wing Minatures and our upcoming Star Wars pen and paper game. The show ran a little long, but we had what felt like a bunch of interesting conversations about lots of different games.
This week we talk about some strange stuff, but I guess in the grand scheme that is par for the course. This was the birthday week of our very own Tam, and we wish him a happy belated birthday. Grace on the other hand had a week full of travel, and while she showed up to give it the good college try…. sounded like just about the tiredest human being I have ever heard. As such we shuffled her off to bed and said we would be ready to talk about Wildstar next week. As far as what we actually did talk about this week…
