Uncategorized

Yesterday was not an amazing day, but there are times you figure someone is out there pulling your puppet strings.  When I left the house I had intended to go get donuts for my team and then head into the office. However I failed to grab the drink I made for myself…  so I had on my brain that I needed to get a drink.  Where do I usually do that… QuikTrip, however for some reason I auto piloted my way to the busiest QuikTrip in town that I never go to in the morning because it has a ton of High School kids hanging out there.  So I go inside and get a drink and am maybe away from my car for five minutes… and when I come back out…  I insert the key into the ignition and nothing.  No sign of any electrical at all… and to make it worse the key will not remove from the ignition.

After doing some googling I realize that if the battery is completely dead the ignition sometimes holds onto the key for some reason as there is a servo that holds it in place.  Now something of note…  I’ve gone through three batteries in a little over six months.  The first battery made some semblance of sense because I figure it was the original to the vehicle.  The second battery…  well maybe it was just a lemon and it was under warranty so while it was a hassle and stranded me at this exact same QuikTrip in 20 degree weather…  it was on a weekend and manageable.  The third battery however…  we are getting into “there has to be a larger cause” territory.  Each time I have had the vehicle in the shop the electrical system tested out fine.

Yesterday instead of bringing it to the same place that I got all of the batteries swapped at… I brought it to the dealership hoping that maybe just maybe they would have more Chevy specific diagnostic information.  The best that they could come up with is that the battery cables were garaged on the end that connects to the vehicle not the battery.  So they swapped those out and swapped the battery that was not toast and I was on my way by mid day.   However it pretty much killed all of the first part of my day and nothing says fun like trying to attend conference calls from a busy car dealership lobby.

I am really hoping when I go out to turn my vehicle on this morning that everything just works.  They think they found the source of the problems but at this point I am just paranoid.  When I said that sometimes a puppet master is out there pulling the strings…  what I meant by that is had I not caught this in the morning I would have instead caught it after about 5:30 at night…  while my vehicle was in a downtown parking garage without an easy way to load it up and tow it.  We would have likely had to push it down and out of the garage to be able to tow it at all given there isn’t enough height clearance for a tow truck to get in there and back out with a vehicle on the trailer.

As far as gaming goes…  I made an attempt at the quest I had been stalled out in Final Fantasy XIV but however didn’t realize there was just about to be a server reset.  As such I made it through the first part of the fight… only to find out there is a whole OTHER part of the fight where I play as Y’shtola.  The server rebooted and killed my connection shortly after starting that… which means I am going to have to restart the entire freaking quest line when I get back.  Were this another game I would have just tossed it in the bin and walked away from it, but I know I HAVE to get through this stupid quest to be able to participate in the upcoming expansion.  This is a dumb quest and Square should feel bad for putting something this painfully long in the MSQ.

Instead I finally landed on playing some Grim Dawn which I still think is probably my favorite Diablo 2 style game out there.  The story is nonsense and the questing system is obtuse… so quite honestly I just keep pushing forward until I get to the next rift which unlocks access to that region from the central hub.  Along the way I appear to be completing some quests as I take down monsters marked with a star over their head.  It is a mechanically fun game, but I can’t say any of the gearing options feel really inspired to me.  Sure it is sorta cool that you can have a gun, but I still wind up running around with a big two handed weapon, since my attack of choice is a big overhead smash that sends a shockwave along the ground.

Here is hoping that today is less messed up and that nothing out of the ordinary occurs.  It is also my hope that tonight I can return to that quest line and finally beat the damned thing so I can move on with my life.  Final Fantasy XIV is not really endearing itself to me right now, but I want to finish the story that I have missed.

I’m feeling like crap this morning so I am probably going to be fairly brief as far as blog posts go.  Granted I just said that in the least brief way I could possibly muster…  so who knows.  I played a little Division 2 last night and quite honestly it didn’t grab me.  Of the looty shooty games that were on the market I will say that Division was probably the one that I had the most on again off again relationship with.  Destiny I knew from the first moment I played it that I loved it.  Warframe I knew from the first moment I played it that I largely disliked it.  Division…  I was never quite certain of.  There were aspects that I liked and aspects that I didn’t like…  namely I was never a huge fan of their particular brand of hide behind shit and aim your tiny cursor at someones head.  It felt way more tactical and less visceral than a Destiny where everything is first person gun play.  I found it fine when I was trying to keep track of three targets, but stressed when I was attempting to hide from a dozen targets all bearing down on me.  The movement never felt fluid enough to compensate for the need to constantly be ducking myself behind something.  Also my target personal target acquisition skills seemed to be incompatible with zeroing in on a tiny area of motion fast enough to get in a shot before I also took a lot of damage in the process.

If anything…  all of these things seem to be worsened experience wise for me in the sequel.  The world is more cluttered and there is just more things that you have to reconcile in your field of view… and given that I spend most of my time playing on a 15.4 inch laptop screen…  tracking tiny areas of motion is a challenge.  From what I can tell Division 2 is much like Destiny 2…  where it is mostly the same game just rendered in much higher fidelity.  However just like the first game I am not entirely certain if that is a game that I actually want to play.  The whole military fantasy thing is not really my jam anymore, so that is an initial strike.  Third person shooters are less of my thing than first person shooters…  so that is another strike.  Lastly I am finding that I just don’t enjoy the run from cover to cover sort of gameplay and much prefer to run around guns a blazing…  and Division is a game that actively and brutally punishes you for that.  However as this genre broadens I feel less of a need to try and keep up with all of them.  I play Destiny and Anthem…  and apparently not Division and Warframe.

That is not to say that I won’t spend more time during the weekend giving it an opportunity to infect me with its madness.  This is just a post saying that more or less its the same game that I remember… and that I took two years to hit level cap in.  I know there are a bunch of my friends who are super amped about it and I am not really going to bash the gameplay experience.  It is good at the thing it is doing and I think it is probably better at the thing it is doing than the first game was.  I just find myself questioning if I like the thing that it is trying to do.  It is perfectly reasonable to think that a game is actually pretty good, but that it isn’t a game that you enjoy.  Division 2 is without a doubt a worthy successor to Division…  but I found myself just wanting to play more Anthem.

One of the things I have learned over the nearly ten years of doing this thing… is occasionally you need to see your own words reflected back at you through the eyes of another player for something to finally click into place.  Yesterday my good friend Pete left a comment on my blog and I had one of those moments of clarity.  So for reference the comment was specifically about the statement I made about having trouble engaging with a more traditional MMORPG.

I recently re-subbed to FF XIV; in my case I was so lost I rolled yet another alt to start over. Annndddd I’m really struggling to engage for that same “been playing quasi-MMOs too much” reason. I just feel like the time-invest:reward ratio is off now. Maybe it’s because I started fresh, or maybe I’ve just moved past MMOs. Of course knowing I’m all-in on Anthem in a couple of weeks is also kind of coloring all my gaming experiences now. Everything is just to ‘tide me over’ until Anthem comes.

Ultimately I think the key problem I have been having is that what I am looking for doesn’t quite exist yet.  I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of the quasi-MMO/MMO-lite style games where you get some sort of bit of your cortex lighting up every few minutes as something happens that is interesting and exciting.  This could be an engram drop or a really freaking sweet headshot…  or getting to use your super or favorite grenades…  but something cool is constantly happening.  In a traditional MMORPG it just feels sluggish by comparison with nothing really exciting happening unless you are in a dungeon…  and even then loot has been so sanitized and normalized that nothing really exciting ever drops anymore.  Gone are the days of hoping that one item you had been seeking drops…  and replaced is the item level 300 version of the same item you have been since since item level 100 just scaled up.

Everything feels like what we used to refer to as a “stat stick”, aka those boring trinkets that had a lot of stats on them but didn’t do anything to change the gameplay.  In a MMO-Lite like Destiny, each time I pick up a new weapon it feels like an interesting and unique experience and having that one magically rare “god roll” feels so much better than the slightly less perfect versions I have littering my vault.  In Anthem… each weapon and ability load out felt vastly different than the other options…  so Venom Darts felt significantly different from Pulse Blast for example.  Items in a traditional MMORPG don’t do this… because they are trying desperately not to upset the balance of how each class relates to every other class.  As a result you get the same item over and over scaled up for level as not to upset the apple cart.

Then there is the action aspect that I find myself craving…  in an MMORPG the skill component tends to be either mashing your buttons with Dance Dance Revolution style perfect timing, or your ability to react to things happening quickly, or in the case of Final Fantasy XIV…  execute a choreographed dance perfectly.  Please note I am not discounting the amount of skill that any of those things take, because I have done them all in one form or another but never at the level of polish that the hardcorest of hardcore raiders do.  However this just feels fundamentally different than lining up that perfect headshot or timing a grenade just right as the enemy is running down a hallway and you wind up sweeping that entire group.  That is just a level of interaction that you don’t really get in fantasy games…  and I think is in part why I have been enjoying Assassin’s Creed Origins so much because it gives me some aspects of that.

The more Actiony Fantasy games comes close, but never quite work in the same way that a Destiny, Division, Warframe or Anthem do.  Probably the closest that exists is Skyforge, but while the combat feels great…  the overarching flow of that game is somewhat incomprehensible and it is also “very free to play”.  Neverwinter has a lot of the same traits…  and it can be super enjoyable but it is almost too MMO at times…  and again suffers from the “very free to play” hurdle as well.  I feel like I should take a moment to explain what I mean by that.  Free to play games tend to do a bunch of things to confuse the user and drive them towards buying their way out of holes…  so they give you very limited inventory or in the case of Neverwinter spend lots of time deluging you in complete useless shit that you will loot and fill up that inventory space.  They also have tons of competing currencies that have no direct exchange rate that largely just give me a headache thinking about them.  If I can manage to keep my head down and focus on the quest at hand I can enjoy these games for a period of time…  but again the gear all has the problem of feeling like the exact same item regurgitated over and over with higher stats.

Elder Scrolls Online is a phenomenal MMORPG that wants to be action oriented… and while yes you are constantly swinging your sword with your mouse button in place of hitting an ability with the number 2 to spam it…  it also doesn’t feel very far removed from the traditional formula.  Hitting an ability doesn’t feel exciting in the game and instead just feels like hotbar combat filtered through a different lens.  I continue to play that game for its expansive and wonderful story and my love of the Elder Scrolls setting, but it failed at providing a more action oriented alternative to the MMORPG because in many ways it feels like they didn’t go far enough.  I love the fact that we are limited to a specific number of abilities, but most of those abilities don’t feel powerful enough and can be spammed…  which sorta destroys that feeling of having an exciting moment driven through gameplay.

The game that comes the closest to nailing the Fantasy MMO-Lite is Monster Hunter World.  So many of the elements feel spot on, but it is absolutely NOT trying to be this game and it shows.  Grouping still feels awful even though at least on the PC it is driven by Steam Communities instead of a Clan that requires people to have joined the same session to invite folks into.  It is also very limited in focus… it is about hunting big monsters and if you want to do something other than that the game really doesn’t offer much in the way of opportunities.  There is no “strike” or “dungeon” construct and there are very few activities that offer an opportunity to just hang out and chill, as everything is laser focused on taking down big boss monsters.  However it does nail down the perfect crafting system for one of these MMO Lites or “collect a bunch of monster bits” and then have some NPC make your gear from it.

The challenge is still that no one has quite created a version of the Destiny model that works for Fantasy games.  “For Honor” tried to create a version of melee combat that does things to require skill…  but it feels confusing and obtuse with its rock paper scissors inspired system of defending and attacking.  In a perfect world…  someone would take the world of Anthem… the activities of Destiny… the combat of Monster Hunter World… and package them all together in one MMO-Lite that gives me my fantasy fix.  However for the moments developers all seem to be chasing that looter shooter niche…  which is great…  but sometimes I don’t want to shoot but instead hit people with a sword.  Sure I know that Warframe has that ability but it is still a Sci-Fantasy game…  and I still have issues with the fucked up perspective of the characters in that title and the inability to zoom out further.  What I ultimately want is a game that no one has built yet.

I have a fairly truncated morning because I need to be into work pretty early this morning.  As a result I probably should have made a blog post last night…  but it was a weird evening.  I found it difficult to get into the right mindset to make a post, and since I don’t have a lot to talk about this morning I thought I would share pictures of something that makes me extremely happy.  Now if you follow me over on twitter you have already seen these images.  Over the weekend I made a trip to a local flea market that has a booth set up by someone who makes these awesome geeky plastic canvas creations.

Prior to last weekend I had the Deathly Hallows sign, the Ewok and the Nintendo Controller as well as a Tardis keychain that I wear on my lanyard (not pictured).  This weekend I sorta cherry picked over some of my favorites from the rest of what they were offering.  So I added a Deathstar and Boba Fett to the Star Wars Collection, and picked up Bullet Bill and a Boo from some of the Super Mario Bros themed ones they had.  Finally I picked up a bagged set of Zelda stuff…  including Link, the Tri-Force and a Bomb

The last time I was there I did not see the Mana Symbols from Magic the Gathering…  so I absolutely had to pick up my favorites to represent my Golgari pride and my love of all things Green and Black.  After putting these all up in my cube… I realized I had a bunch more space available so at some point I will make another trip back to add a few more to the wall.  I have this metal bar that runs the entire length of my office and I sorta want it completely covered in these creations.  The sad part is the person doesn’t have an Etsy or anything of the sort listed in the Flea Market booth or I would absolutely advertise the heck out of it.  Whatever the case they make me extremely happy and tomorrow I promise I will return with a more proper blog post.