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I am going to warn you ahead of time that this story is going to be a bit of a wild ride. I’ve tried to provide details, reference links, and images wherever possible. However since I have never told it on this blog, and Oklahoma is in the news right now for our crazy “Bigfoot Hunting Season” legislation… it seemed like the right time to talk about it. Something you have to understand about the region I grew up in, is that it has very low population density and miles of largely undisturbed river bottoms attached to the Verdigris River complex that eventually winds its way to the Arkansas river and eventually to the Mississippi. The Bigfoot or Sasquatch is just something that has been talked about my entire life. I grew up around a large density of Native Americans and they would talk about the creature like it was fact not speculation, so admittedly it is a little hard not to get caught up in the romance of the tale.

The Noxie Monster

We are going to start this tale with something that comes right before I was born. In 1975 there was a Bigfoot sighting in Noxie, Oklahoma some 15-20 miles away from the County seat of Nowata where I grew up. It turns out my Dad who wanted to be a professional Photographer and and his Cousin who eventually became a photo journalist got the Bigfoot hunting bug. It was decided they were going to try their best to snag photographic evidence. Over the course of a few weeks in September they crawled throughout the Northwestern region of the county surrounding the farmstead where the sighting took place. They never really saw anything other than the fact that the landowner that made the sighting was very visibly shaken by the incident. It turns out that he accidentally shot his hunting dog one night thinking the “monster” had come back.

Boyscouting

Growing up I was heavily involved in Boy Scouting. While taking care of my parents over the last few months I happened upon my old scouting shirt where you can see the various badges and such I earned. Scouting got its start in Oklahoma and was largely brought to the Americas by Frank and Waite Phillips of Phillips petroleum fame. The very first troop organized was in Pawhuska Oklahoma and as such my Troop 29 identification legitimately means we were the 29th chapter given our proximity. I ultimately made the rank of Eagle before dropping out of the pattern of attending scouting events in 93/94-ish. One of the challenges that comes with remembering back to this era is that the years sort of blend together. However I am pretty sure that our tale takes place in 1989, and I have some reasoning that goes into that. It surrounded a Birthday weekend, of one of the individuals involved and I know for certain it was not 1990. At that party it took place days before we were going to scout camp, and I had just gotten my grubby mitts on Final Fantasy 1 for the Nintendo, which released in 1990 and I was super sour about having to wait a full weeks time to play it… and ended up bringing it with me to the birthday party and stayed up all night long grinding the area surrounding the Marsh Cave trying to get through it. The birthday in question must have taken place the previous year which would have been 1989.

The Campground

Our scouting troop had been together since we were all cub scouts, and part of that leadership was the Biggerstaff clan. Adam was one of the members of the Troop and one of my close friends, his mom one of the den mothers, and his dad one of the adult leaders as we transitioned into boy scouts over cub scouts. At some point during the scouting journey they purchased a huge acreage that bordered the riverbottoms and because of the huge area of land this became our stomping grounds for so many shenanigans. We even managed to build a freaking bridge out of telephone poles and railroad ties to make it easier to traverse an area of the pasture. The highlight however as this little nook in the northwestern corner of the property bordering up against the fenceline that we turned into a permanent campground of sorts. The funny thing about it is with the advent of google maps and satellite view I have at my fingertips things I never could have dreamed of as a teenager. This area seemed so massive to me but in reality it isn’t nearly as big as I thought. We never did get the pond to a state of it being swimmable, but did stock it with some fish so it was at least fishable. When they first bought the property it was overgrown with moss but a few moss carp took care of that. Sadly I see no visual evidence of bridge work, but it was in the lower left corner of the above image over that creek. We had originally tried to turn that corner into a campground but it was entirely too infested with tarantulas to make it a long term goal.

The First Incident

I feel like I have been talking around the story up until this point, so I guess it is just time to dive into it. I remember specifically that the gathering in question and campout associated with it was for Adams birthday. Since our little group was a bit like the kids from Stranger Things, there was a heavy crossover between those invited to the party and those who were part of the scouting troop. I’ve attempted to draw what I remember of the scene on top of the satellite photos for visual reference. I remember the area being significantly more wooded than the satellite photo shows. So I attempted to shade in green an area that I remember being the treeline at the time some thirty two years ago. The other problem with the overhead photos is they were taken in winter, so nothing looks anywhere near as full as it actually is during the summer months. Essentially the campground was a little clearing right up against the northwestern fenceline of the property bordering the riverbottoms. It had a semi-permanent fire ring and then we would set up our tents in the open area just south of this, generally a single depth arc around the fire. There was a trail through the treeline on which we dug a latrine with a crudely lashed together lean-to allowing you to do your business in peace. When it came time to shut down for the night, the adults would hang a lantern on a dead tree that had a good branch for such things at the entrance to this trail, in theory allowing someone to find their way to the latrine at night if they were really desperate. To the best of my knowledge no one was ever that desperate.

On this specific trip I was bunking with a guy named Ryan, that we called “Slimer” because he was sort of our mascot and we could get him to do pretty much anything. Look this is 80s friend group logic and also Ghostbusters was still a big deal at this point. We were staying in an A Frame tent that we generally referred to as a “Pup Tent”, this one specifically was beige but I copy pasted this example from Amazon because I remember it being pretty similar. The opening faced the fire ring and thus the entrance to the trail. Both of us were pretty chill and ended up bunking together because we actually wanted to sleep… not stay up all night doing nonsense. Some of the campers were known for doing pranks and such and we were attempting to avoid this. I was not taken to wearing a watch at this time in my life, so I have no clue what time it was when I was awoken by some sound. I scanned outside the tent to see what it might have been when I noticed someone messing with the lantern at the entrance to the trail. At first I thought it was one of the adults adjusting it, but as my befuddled state faded I noticed the the thing was batting the lantern with its hand. Now this lantern was hung at least 10 ft off the ground and required either standing on something or using a stick to hang it up there. I woke Ryan up to see if he was also seeing what I was seeing, and we sat there for a few minutes whispering trying to sort out what was happening. I am guessing our frantic whispering was not as quiet as we thought, because whatever it was bolted and started running towards our tent, or at least at the time I thought it was running towards our tent. At some point it veered to the west before it hit the fire ring and headed to the fenceline, hurdling it in a single fluid motion before heading out into the neighboring pasture and disappearing out of our sightline. I drew in orange what I am guessing the path probably was, but at the time it certainly felt like it was heading towards us.

The problem is I can only speculate what it actually was. It was a humanoid figure and it was dark, but the fact that it was a figure standing between us and a light source is pretty much going to mean all we really saw was a silhouette. While our eyes were adjusted to the dark, I can’t for certain pick out any specific details about the figure. I certainly thought “Sasquatch” at the time given its scale. I’ve seen a truly countless number of whitetail deer and it certainly wasn’t something like that. Far as I am aware there are no bears in this area, nor am I aware of bears being able to hurdle fences like a track star. I remember thinking it was very tall and relatively lanky for the height. My 1980s brain thought that it looked sorta like the outline of Chewbacca. Past that I don’t really trust my memory of specific details. I do remember being extremely scared and not really talking much about what we had just witnessed for the rest of the night. I am sure at some point sleep claimed me, but I remember sitting there staring out at the night for a really long time afraid it would come back for us. Neither of us told the others the next morning, and it was years before I was really willing to talk about it myself.

Some Math

I have no clue why this is suddenly important to right down this story today, but as a result I have been doing copious amounts of searching for various bits of information. Firstly I was curious how tall a humanoid would have to be in order to carelessly bat around a lantern that was in theory hung roughly 10 ft up in the air. In my searching I found this interesting blog with a built in Standing Reach calculator, allowing you to type in your height and get an estimation of what your Standing Reach would be. So in order to comfortably reach that 10 foot high lantern, the humanoid in question would need to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 feet tall. Granted that is taking a bunch of assumptions that a “Bigfoot” would have a human like ratio of arm to height, when that might be the case depending on how much after how similar they might be to our shared primate ancestors.

Now for some more math. The average barbed wire fence stands around 4 foot tall, and from what I remember it was the standard ubiquitous red topped metal fence post construction similar to the above photo. I do not remember the vertical pieces designed to keep the fence tight however because we absolutely crawled through the fence on a few occasions. The calculation that I am not sure about, nor am I really certain how to find out is what it would take to seamlessly leap over a fence like that. The tallest hurdles used in track and field events are around 3.5 feet in height, so I am guessing this hypothetical 8 foot tall humanoid should have the clearance to cross a 4 foot tall fence. Again this takes a lot of things for granted, that a Sasquatch would have similar abilities to a Human of that size and build.

The Second Incident

After we got up and around, ate some breakfast the birthday boy wanted to go roam around in the river bottoms. After having experienced what I did the night before, I was apprehensive but eventually was talked into doing so. I guess I figured there were enough of us roaming around in a group that nothing was going to happen, safety in numbers sort of thing. Before long I had forgotten myself and we were playing hide and seek in the trees. Ryan and I once again paired up and ended up breaking away from the group. We kept slipping away as they tried to find us and eventually hung his knock off members only jacket up on a tree trying to convince them that we were hiding somewhere we were not. We did this for several hours and when it was finally around lunch time we all met up as a group. We were about to head back, when I remembered that we didn’t have Ryan’s jacket and since it was my idea to hang it up I figured I should be the one to retrieve it. I had hung it on a tree near the bank of the creek running through the property. I pulled it down from the branch that was holding it and as I was turning to walk back to my friends I heard a noise behind me. On the other side of the creek in the treeline there was what looked to be a humanoid shape walking away from me back into the trees. Once again zero clue what exactly it was, but in my mind I was thinking it had to be whatever we saw the night before.

The Area

One of the things about this area is that there is a near unbroken series of low lying forested riverbottoms that span from the verdigris river all of the way up into Southern Kansas. When my dad was talking about Noxie growing up, things like Google Maps did not exist. So today as I was thinking about that tale of him hunting for Photographic evidence I finally thought to plot how close Noxie was to the area in which I had my own sighting. If you measure as the crow flies from the point of my sighting to the relative area of where I think the Noxie sighting was it is roughly 16 miles. However if you also look at the map there is pretty much a pathway through the green forested areas that could lead one between the two points. I am not saying necessarily that they are connected, but that sighting in 1975 took place far closer than I ever realized as a kid. So you have to take some pretty severe leaps of reason here and assume that what I saw was a Bigfoot, but I am left not knowing any other explanations. The second day sighting could have been literally anything, but I tend to personally focus on the Lantern incident because it is significantly more clear in my memory. I have no clue what the range of something like a Bigfoot might be. If you take an animal like a bear, they have an active range of around 15 to 20 miles depending on a bunch of variables. What would the active range of something as large as a Sasquatch be in that case?

The Third Sighting

For this next incident we scan forward several years. I’ve graduated High School and am still living at home and commuting back and forth to Junior college in an attempt to get a college degree on the cheap. It was during this era that I discovered the internet and more importantly IRC, and through Vampire Roleplay Channels I met this girl who was attending Pitt State in Pittsburg Kansas. As a result I would occasionally make the roughly two hour drive to go see her in person throughout late 1995 and early 1996. I would go up US-169 to around Cherryvale KS, grab US-400 through Parsons KS and on into Pittsburg KS. The above area is as far as I can tell the stretch of road this third incident took place on. I left my girlfriends apartment in Pittsburg around midnight and was driving back. I had just made it through Parsons and was crossing a creek which in theory would have been the creek you can see on the lower left hand corner of the image above. As I was driving along, something crossed the road in front of me that made me slam on my brakes for fear of hitting it. It was large, humanoid, dark and extremely fast moving. I remember sitting there for awhile not exactly sure what I had just seen before continuing driving again. I made a stop at some convenience store just down the road to get a drink and calm my nerves a bit. I am guessing that I rattled the attendant as well because when I got home I noticed something odd. When I stopped to get a drink and something to munch on, I paid with a $20 bill and should have gotten back a $10 and some ones. What I instead had sitting in my wallet was $100 bill and some ones, and apparently neither of us noticed this. I wasn’t super keen on driving that road by night anymore, and limited any trips up to the daytime. Truthfully we had a falling out not long after, which is a bummer because I never got back my original hardbound copy of Werewolf the Apocalypse. Again I have no clue what crossed the road but it absolutely looked like a large humanoid leaping across.

Out of curiosity I did the same thing that I did with my original sighting and Noxie, and drew a measurement as the crow flies. That spot on US-400 is way closer than I would have assumed. Drawing a straight line between the two points is roughly 35 miles. Once again most of this region of Oklahoma and Southern Kansas are dotted with these low lying creekbeds and hollows. Not saying there is any connection, but were fencelines not an issue you could get from point A to point B again without ever leaving wooded low lying areas.

The Rationalization

So where I am left with all of this is that I can rationalize away everything except that first incident. Up in Kansas it was after midnight on a somewhat unfamiliar stretch of road and literally anything could have crossed and startled me. I thought it was humanoid in shape but who knows what I saw because it was over in a second and I was left only with scattered thoughts to piece it together. The second incident I saw movement in the trees on the other side of a creek and what I thought was a humanoid shape walking away. However it could have been anything in the woods or it could have been nothing. I could have startled something and my mind played tricks on me for the humanoid shape. The one I cannot rationalize away is whatever was batting that lantern all those years ago and that bolted across a 4 foot tall fence like it was nothing. Enough time passed during that incident that I feel like I had my wits about me. Time perception is really hard. When you find yourself in an intense situation it often feels like time slows down. In my mind it felt like five or more minutes passed, but maybe it was significantly less and that my mind just sorta played those events back after the fact in slow motion. I can’t with any certainty say that I saw a “Bigfoot”, but the region does have a history of whispered Sasquatch sightings. I do wish I had a more scientific mind at the time and would have actually looked for some form of evidence. Again I have no clue why it was suddenly important for me to talk about this. I think the whole Bigfoot Hunting season is pure nonsense and mostly bait for the press to talk about it. That said this region does have a history of sightings or at least supposed sightings. I saw something that I can’t reason away and I largely think of this as a my Bigfoot story, but the truth is I have no clue exactly what I saw. People get real weird around me when I have opened up about this. Chances are a few of you are going to treat me like I have a little less sanity than you thought afterwards. It just felt like something that I wanted to get out there. The post My Bigfoot Story appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Bless Unleashed is a game that I have been watching for awhile since I first heard about it at Pax West 2018. A friend of mine appears to be doing some work with the game and hooked me up with closed beta test access along with a few keys to hand out to my readers, but we will talk about that specifically later. First lets clear up some confusion, because I can see that you might be thinking… but wait Bel didn’t this game release in 2018? The answer to that would be no but also sorta yes? Bless Online and Bless Unleashed are two different games in the Bless series, with the first being a traditional hotbar combat style MMORPG and Unleashed being more of a action combat limited hotkey affair. Last night I spent several hours playing around in the Closed Beta and immediately it feels like a mix of TERA, Neverwinter and Skyforge.

The bulk of your combat takes place with the left and right mouse buttons with some longer cooldowns existing on four buttons bound by default to numeric keys 1-4. The game uses an auto combo system similar to TERA where if you hit the left mouse button once you get a specific ability, but if you hit it again in rapid succession it actually performs a different ability. Combinations of left and right mouse clicks can be chained together to do specific combos, and there is an in game guide to these. By default your evade button is bound to the spacebar and jump to control, though the longer I played the more likely I was to swap these because I am a jumper in MMORPGs.

You start the game by choosing from one of the five classes and four races, but really… class is the piece you have the most control over. Thankfully this is not a game with gender locked classes like Black Desert Online, but each class does have a very limited choice of the four races of Human, Elf, Varg (big cat people), and Ippin (think Asura from GW2). For example I rolled a Crusader and had the ability to create a Human or an Ippin. When I went to create a Ranger later, that specific class was locked to only being able to play as an Elf. Race appears to strictly be a visual choice because I did not see any real difference between them.

You are given a number of presets that you can start with and then modify further. I hate futzing with faces in these sort of character creators, so I ultimately went with the face that I liked the best and then started customizing from there. You have a pretty wide range of options and almost all of the color pickers employ a full color gamut slider system allowing you to have purple skin and flame orange hair if you so choose it. For me I largely tried to create “Belghast” which regardless of the game has certain specific sensibilities. So I went with the dark hair, ponytail, full beard thing that I have done since World of Warcraft, and the closer a game gets to allowing me to do that thing the better.

For the most part Bless Unleashed passed with flying colors when it comes to the character creation system. There are some quirks I have encountered so far in combat. For example there are attacks that will stun your character and you have to mash spacebar, left and right mouse button at the same time in order to break free. My instinct is to stay holding on the movement keys while doing this so I will move out of the effect as fast as possible. However it seems that you have to ease up off them and re-engage them in order for the game to acknowledge that you are wanting to move now. That feels off but once I realized that was what was happening I adjusted.

The story being told is not the most engaging in the world, and if you have ever played ArcheAge, Blade & Soul, Black Desert Online or TERA you are likely going to be familiar with the style of questing that I largely associate with South Korean MMORPGs. There is a lot that is supposedly aiding the people and leading towards the core story of the game, but really it just feels like busy work. There is partial voice acting where the NPC says something… but it is completely unrelated to the dialog that is actually being said on screen. Essentially this is the modern equivalent of the Orc Peon cycling through a series of lines when you click on it in Warcraft 2. Instead of “Zug Zug” you get some comment about the festival that is going on, or that the weather is looking nice.

So far the moment to moment gameplay feels pretty enjoyable and combat feels fluid. You are going to spend most of your time attacking with dodges happening at specific times when the mob is very obviously building up to some bigger attack. I am curious to play the game when there aren’t quite so many people in the same area because since the game has open tagging and instanced looting… everyone was basically just attacking everything and getting credit for it. I mean don’t get me wrong I greatly prefer open tagging to strict encounter tagging, since the later is miserable when there is mob contention. However I would like to see how the questing flow feels once I am having to stand on my own two feet a bit more.

As of now I am not really seeing much in the way of telltale cash shop monetization. Things like bag space for example are slowly earned over time being doing stuff in the world and then trading in these scraps to NPCs for additional space. Mounts similarly seem to be permanently unlocked and not the nonsense of 7 day licenses as is the case in so many South Korean free to play games. Doing a bit of research it seems that they may be going down the Battle Pass route for monetization, which I am absolutely fine with. It could however just be that we have not reached the phase of testing where they are working in the Cash Shop. Whatever the case at this very moment there doesn’t seem to be any signs of this.

Now we are at the point of talking about access to this Closed Beta test. This current testing phase started last night at 6 pm PST and will conclude on Monday the 18th at roughly 6 pm PST. During that time I believe the servers are up 24/7 and you will have full access to the game. Right now the testing phase is being run through steam, and as I said at the beginning of this post I have been given a handful of keys to give away. I am going to be doing these on a first come first serve basis and in order to get one, drop a comment below telling me you are interested. Past that I will sort out a way to get you one of the keys privately. I will likely be dinking around in the test throughout the weekend. I am over on the North American server and shocking to no one my primary character is the sword and board class named Belghast. If you make it into the game ping me and say hello. The post Bless Unleashed Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Yesterday I ranted a bit in a twitter thread about how generally bad of a steward Electronic Arts has been over the Star Wars licensing. From 2010 to 2020, Lucasfilm had granted Electronic Arts the exclusive rights to develop video games for the Star Wars brand. At the time this maybe seemed like a good bet on the side of LucasFilm because Bioware was just about to released a Massively Online Roleplaying Game based on the wildly popular Knights of the Old Republic setting. However over the years Electronic Arts held the license they really did not do much with it. Here is a quick rundown of the titles that were released under this license agreement.

• Star Wars the Old Republic – 2011 – Started prior to the agreement
• Star Wars Battlefront – 2015
• Star Wars Battlefront II – 2017
• Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes – 2015 – Mobile Only
• Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – 2019
• Star Wars: Squadrons – 2020
• The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey to Batuu – 2020
• Star Wars: Rise to Power – 2021 – Mobile Only

Of those titles other than SWTOR there is only one that I would really consider to be a great experience, but I’ve heard good things about Squadrons and the Sims pack but those are not really in my wheelhouse. What makes this extremely criminal is the fact that they held the reigns to this license during one of the most prolific periods in the history of the Star Wars brand. Let’s take a look really quick at the other Star Wars content that was released during this time frame.

• The Majority of the Star Wars Clone Wars series – Seasons 3-7 – 2010 > 2020
• The entirety of the Star Wars Rebels Series – 2014 > 2017
• The entirety of the Resistance series – 2014 > 2020
• Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens – 2015
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – 2016
• Star Wars Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
• Solo: A Star Wars Story – 2018
• Star Wars Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker – 2019
• Forces of Destiny micro series – 2017 > 2018
• Galaxy of Adventure micro series – 2018 > 2020
• The Mandalorian series – 2019 > 2020

If you look at the past list of games from the Star Wars franchise you will realize that more than likely every single one of those major touch points of film or media would have had some sort of game released for it. Instead we got two shooters, a really solid soulsian game, a space dog fighting game and an asset pack for the Sims. This all comes up because Disney just announced the creation of Lucasfilm Games and in doing so more or less verified that EA would be losing their exclusivity deal. Yesterday it was announced that Ubisoft Massive is working on a new open world Star Wars game just to further drive that point home. I am certain that EA will still be able to make games in the franchise, they are just going to have to compete with everyone else at the same time. In light of all of this… I thought I would spend a little bit of time this morning talking about some of my favorite Star Wars games.

Star Wars: Yoda Stories

We are going to start off with what is likely the worst game on the list. Yoda Stories came out in 1997 and was in the weird category of desktop games. This was meant to compete with the likes of Minesweeper or Solitaire, but offered a small randomized adventure that you could flip over to and play while doing other things. There is just something nostalgic about this title and while it was arguably not great I still love it. It did so poorly that right now the game is largely considered abandonware and has made several worst games lists. That said it holds a special place in my heart. This came from a company called Torus Games.

Star Wars Arcade Game

Going back old school now, I remember the first time I experienced this game in the arcade. It had this sit down cabinet that made you feel like you were in the cockpit of an X-Wing and had voice sampling that I had never really experienced to that point. It felt like I was in the movie and I loved it… even though it cost two whole quarters to play it as opposed to the usual single quarter games. I was never terribly good at it because just the act of going to an arcade was rare enough, let alone going there with enough quarters to be able to play this game and practice on it. This was published by Atari.

Star Wars: Dark Forces

It was Doom… but Star Wars and while there were unofficial conversions of Doom that let you do the same basic thing I was completely hooked on this game. The graphics seemed amazing at the time and the storytelling was considerably better than most shooters that were available. It even had fully rendered spaceships… even though they were mostly just made out of the same blocky chunks that the texture mapped terrain was. It felt like I was legitimately on a mission to save the republic from the empire. This game hails from the Lucasarts era.

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

Sure this game is the direct sequel to the game I just talked about, but it was so much more. While Dark Forces was a Doom like game that used 2D sprites to represent 3D enemies, Jedi Knight was rendered in low polygon glory with actual 3D models. This also allowed the player to shift out to the third person giving me my first taste of what it would be like to wield a lightsaber like a proper Jedi. This game also gave me my first real tastes of Nar Shaddaa, because while the first game allowed you to go there you didn’t really spend a whole lot of time exploring it. It also had an expansion to the game that featured Mara Jade which at this point was one of my favorite Star Wars characters. Again this is a title from the classic era of Lucasarts.

Star Wars Rebellion

This game comes from an era when maybe the licensing had loosened up a bit too much. There were several games that came out in the 1998-2000 era and not all of them were winners. This one however I thought had a lot of promise. Essentially it is a game that could be described as what if Civilization or Master of Orion were a Star Wars game. It came from the folks behind Civilization II Test of Time and essentially brought you into galactic conquest with a 4X style map. It wasn’t near as polished as Civ or MOO but it was still enjoyable because it let me do things I had always wanted to do with my then favorite franchise. This came from Coolhand Interactive which far as I am aware only really created the two games mentioned here. It however is still available through steam and gog.

Super Star Wars Series

I am going to lump the three games in this series together because effectively they were direct continuations of the same game and same mechanics. I probably played Super Empire Strikes Back the most of the three, but I loved them all the same. They were published by JVC but were developed by Acclaim via Sculptured Software and featured a very loose retelling of the original three movies in side scrolling 16 bit form. The biggest thing I remember about them is that they were extremely tough and had several moments that you just sort of had to memorize a pattern. None of that mattered because it let me run around with a lightsaber in a 16 bit game and it was my beloved Star Wars. There was a cycle of Nintendo Entertainment System games that predated these but I never really spent much time playing them.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic

There are not words enough in the galaxy to fully explain just how much I love this game. During the prequel era I had started to fall out of love with Star Wars as a construct. This means I missed a lot of games that were probably pretty solid, because I felt betrayed by those movies. Looking back in hindsight they are far better than I gave them credit for at the time, but I was a jaded GenXer mad at them for fucking up my Star Wars. Knights of the Old Republic brought me by to the fold by fully realizing the comic book setting in glorious 3D roleplaying action. This is still my favorite setting in the entirety of Star Wars and now that we are entering this time of boutique Disney Plus series, I am hoping that maybe just maybe we will get something in the Old Republic Bioware setting. Star Wars the Old Republic is also phenomenal, but I largely think of it as a direct continuation of this same game. I do hope at some point we will get a KOTOR 3. I don’t consider any of this an EA game even though EA gobbled up Bioware, because KOTOR and SWTOR date back to a storied past of Bioware that I don’t think exists any longer.

Jedi Fallen Order

I’ve talked a lot about this game recently, and as such I am probably not going to talk at length about it right now. Suffice to say this is the only Electronic Arts Star Wars game on the list. Even at that this is probably a game that should not have existed were it not for the willpower of Vince Zampella and Respawn Entertainment. This game breaks all of the things that EA was setting out to do at that time. It is not a service based title, it has no micro transactions and it tells a single player narrative story. However it is probably the best game to come out of the Electronic Arts hive mind during the last decade. My hope is that the overwhelming success of this title along with the critical acclaim it garnered makes EA rethink their business practices.

A Bright Future for Star Wars

I hope we are just about to enter a new era of greatness for Star Wars games. I am giddy at thinking about what the team at Massive can do in creating a vast open world Star Wars adventure. I love the detail of the world of Division 1 and 2 and could see that applied to a gritty Star Wars setting. Image a game like Cyberpunk set in a setting like Nar Shaddaa where you operate in an out of all of the gangs in that city as a free agent ultimately carving your own path through the city. That seems like an experience that would be firmly in the wheelhouse of that team and I would absolutely be excited to play it. What were some of your favorite Star Wars games that I missed on my personal list? Drop me a line below and let me know. I realize there are a lot of games that I never touched during the prequels era due to general fatigue in the franchise. The post Lucasfilm Games appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

It is funny how some things get stuck in your life because you are used to doing them. One of these is the concept of preordering video games. I remember a time not all that long ago, at least in my span of time when I never ordered a game ahead of time. There was almost a thrill of the chase on release day, of trying to go out and find the last copy of something available in town. I remember when the Shadows of Luclin expansion for Everquest launched frantically spending my lunch hour trying to find a copy. I ended up going to three stores and finally found a copy at the Software Etc. in Woodland Hills Mall, where it was one of the last three copies they had. Similarly I remember scrounging around desperately trying to find a copy of Trials of Atlantis for Dark Age of Camelot a few years later. I wound up picking up the very last copy they had at the EB Games in Promenade Mall and feeling like a freaking champion for snagging it. When Battlefield 2 released, the entire office was playing it and I remember my friend Chuck and I making a trek across town to pick up the last few copies at a Game Stop. There was something about the struggle of acquiring a game that added to the experience and to be truthful all of these years later I still remember these moments so there must have been some truth to that.

Something shifted along the way. Stores became more reliant on preorder numbers and midnight launches, making it a bit harder to get a copy of the game. I remember with World of Warcraft I walked into Walmart at midnight and snagged a copy off the giant display kiosk, and when Burning Crusade came out expecting to do the same. Difference being there was not giant kiosk and copies were delayed and I remember it being a few days before I could track down a copy and join my friends playing the new hotness. Getting a late start in an MMORPG expansion felt crushing, but I didn’t really learn from my lesson and I was back at Walmart at midnight for Wrath of the Lich King and managed to walk away with one of only two collectors editions they had. At this point I was getting older and decided that the bullshit of trying to get to a store at midnight was nonsense so I just started placing a preorder online whenever they opened up, expecting that magically on release day a copy would show up on my door stop. Around this same time Digital Downloads were becoming a thing and I remember that Mass Effect 2 was one of the very first games that I purchased and downloaded. It was through a service called Direct 2 Drive, and they only had a handful of offerings but had Mass Effect 2 on day one. The problem being that I also had a 2 meg DSL connection and it took for freaking ever to download anything.

I am pretty sure that it was the a Steam Christmas sale circa 2007/2008 that converted me to the digital lifestyle that I have now. There was something about being able to purchase an entire publishers catalog of games for $50 that was way too appealing to ignore. I remember doing this for THQ and I still have games in my library from that one purchase that I have never played. Now I still had a shit internet connection that I think at that point had been upgraded to 6 meg but was still sheer misery as game sizes increases. I would set something to download before going to bed and in theory when I got not the next morning it would be ready to go. Thing is if it was a game I was interested in and wanted to play on that first day, I would still pre-order the game because Steam introduced the concept of preloading. This would allow you to download almost all of the game save for a few critical bits that would patch in as the game officially released. This would allow me or anyone like me on a crappy connection to be on a level playing field with everyone starting at midnight or whatever the launch window happened to be. This began a habit of just locking down a purchase of any games that I was super into and wanting to play immediately.

The problem is that what used to be necessity, just turned into another habit that I followed without thinking about it. I’ve long since had reliable and fast internet and can download most games in a matter of minutes. Yet I still have continued the practice of locking in that pre-order as though there was some scarcity associated with it. I’ve realized that there are games in my library that I preordered and have never actually played. Doom Eternal for example, I locked that purchase in months ahead of time and never actually got around to playing it since I had never finished the original 2016 release. So it is sitting there on the digital shelf waiting on me and cost me a premium to do so. There is a mindset that I developed of maybe missing out on something, because for the longest time there were tangible bonuses associated with getting you to lock in that purchase. This might have been the case that there was something worth having that you got exclusively through a pre-order. However in my experience these items tend to be largely throw away, as they might be useful for a few minutes upon immediately starting the game but will ultimately be trash after thirty minutes of gameplay. Additionally on the cosmetic front it seems that most games ultimately sell the preorder package after some time as a “priced to own” DLC.

Then there is the other side of the coin, that preorders support the hype fueled system of game marketing. Everything seems to be focused on getting you to lock in that purchase and often times had you just waited you would have realized that it maybe wasn’t a game you were willing to gamble full price on. Marvel’s Avengers and Godfall for example are poster children for games that I probably should not have preordered because as soon as they released the writing was clearly on the wall that there were issues. However there would also be gems that I love like Cyberpunk and Mass Effect Andromeda that I maybe would not have purchased given equally bad press. So I guess it is a bit of a double edged sword, but at a minimum I wouldn’t have been out full price for when I eventually experimented with them. I get the concept of physical preorders because there is legitimate scarcity there. This has been shown clearly this year with the PlayStation 5 and them being nigh impossible to purchase. However for me at least I am beginning to realize that there is zero point to preordering a game I am going to purchase digitally ahead of release day. There are so few games that I am absolutely going to be trying to play at midnight as the servers click on, and even then… with my internet connection pending I go through a reputable broker like Steam it is highly likely I will still be able to download that purchase within a reasonable time frame. There is an anachronism associated with the digital pre-order that I think I am going to stop supporting.

There are a whole slew of games that I am super interested in playing, but my goal for 2021 is to preorder none of them. This is going to go against years of built up instincts, but I am going to wait and watch and then download it as the game actually releases. I am not going to allow myself to get caught up in the hype machine of a preorder going live six months before a game is going to release, regardless of how cool the sizzle reel ends up being. We live in this wonderful time when at the push of a button I can have pretty any bit of content delivered to me on a whim, and it is time that I start treating it as such. There is no scarcity in this system and I am not going to miss out on getting access to something, so I need to push down that FOMO and behave in a sane and rational manner. So there you go. This is my year of no preorders. I hope I keep to that goal. The post Anachrony of Preorders appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.