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E3 2017 Anticipation

June 9, 2017 by Belghast

Next week is e3 and as is usually the case the first glimmers of what is going to be talked about have started leaking their way onto YouTube. There are several sites out there with pretty legitimate looking lists of what games have an have not been confirmed to be appearing. Functionally the show tends to revolve around several large press events, with a smattering of other news trickling out around them. The big shows tend to happen before the actual event starts, which means this weekend. For those interested here is the schedule I have been able to scrape together… most of which will be available through a stream of some sort.

Electronic Arts – Saturday June 10th – 12 pm PDT
Microsoft – Sunday June 11th – 2 pm PDT
Bethesda – Sunday June 11th – 9 pm PDT
Devolver Digital – Sunday June 11th – 10 pm PDT
PC Gaming Show – Monday June 12th – 10 am PDT
Ubisoft – Monday June 12th – 1 pm PDT
Sony – Monday June 12th – 6 pm PDT
Nintendo – Tuesday June 13th – 9 am PDT

The last several years the PC Gaming show has been an awkward cringefest to watch… but it sort of fit its late night time slot. With them moving it to a morning slot, I am wondering if that is a ploy to get more folks to show up and peddle their pc gaming wares. Whatever the case I can pretty much guarantee that I am going to be watching most if not all of this over the next few days… or at least the ones that are not happening during work hours. The show I am traditionally the most excited for is Bethesda, because in years past they have absolutely nailed giving gamers exactly the sort of things they wanted to be hearing about. With the Fallout 4 story arc finished, and a new Elder Scrolls outing still supposedly years away… I am not terribly certain what we might be seeing. It is almost certain that we will be seeing some Quake Champions news… but a twitchy competitive reflex shooter doesn’t exactly excite the 40 year old version of myself the same way it might have the 17 year old me. I mean I can always hope beyond hope that they will drop the mic this year with the reveal of Elder Scrolls VI but I won’t exactly be holding my breath either. Instead here are the few titles I am really looking forward to hearing more about.

State of Decay 2

State of Decay is one of those games that I loved… but never really played as much of it as I would have liked. At the time of release it was an Xbox 360 title and I just didn’t spend that much time playing my 360. When it released on PC I had a furious few weekends of playing it again… and have wound up purchasing it as a gift for several people. However I never really gave the game as much time as I would have liked because it was missing one core feature… multiplayer. This was the sort of world that I really wanted to go out and explore with my friends, and the absence of that option tarnished the experience for me. What I am wanting from E3 is just more of everything and a firm release date on when we can expect the game.

Destiny 2

I am just so damned ready for this game to release if we are being honest. Right now I just want more. I want more information, more game play footage… and I am hoping their mic drop is that we can download and start playing the beta now. I am not holding my breath, but that ultimately is what I want out of the experience. I am already sold and have already pre-ordered the PS4 copy… since the PC pre-orders are not open yet. I want to know a firm date of when the PC is going to launch, because even if it is delayed I want to know how long of a wait.

Farcry 5

This is probably the first Farcry game since the first that I am really excited about. America as a whole has a really hard time confronting our own lunatic fringe or religious extremists. Everything about this game seems like we are going to be fighting back against the madness of a weird religious cult of sorts. I am ready to roam around the backwoods of Montana and take out bad people doing bad things.

Super Mario Odyssey

They had me at “new mario game for switch” but what I am wanting is more details. I want to know when exactly this is going to release because up until now we have only had some wild speculations as a “christmas season” launch. I also want to know more about this real world/mario world fusion, and I am wondering if it is going to have tie ins to Super Mario Land in Universal Studios Japan. Nintendo is generally the least forthcoming with the conferences as far as hard data goes… but I really just want to know when this is going to launch.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

We have not heard much from “Not-Castlevania” in awhile and I am hoping they have something to show off at E3. Once again there is the common theme of me knowing a game is coming out… and just wanting some hard data on it. I am a backer and have already played through the Demo game they released as a proof of concept several times… and now I am just ready for the full meal. Everything I experienced to date was spot on with exactly how I wanted this game to feel… they just need to push it across the finish line and not end up botching it in the process.

Like Its The End

May 26, 2017 by Belghast

I am going through this really odd period with World of Warcraft. My friend Grace and I had a conversation last night… and it feels like it is the end of an expansion. I guess at this point in the last several expansions the game has been thoroughly in maintenance mode, and we were waiting with baited breath to see if someone announced anything about the expansion. However in this case there is apparently still a good deal of content left to be released. We’ve been told that we would be going to Argus, and the Tomb of Sargeras raid has not even opened… so there are still big things looming on the horizon. However the way I am approaching the game right now very much feels like what I do at the end of an expansion. I am doing all manner of superfluous things that bring my pleasure. For example during the Warlords of Draenor expansion you could not get me into Tanaan Jungle on a regular basis. Once I got my flight… I disappeared from the zone almost entirely. However lately I have been roaming around out there doing all manner of random stuff and attempting to farm Apexis Crystals. Its like I suddenly decided that I really would like to get that Fel Raven mount that is available from there. I’ve also started doing a bunch of achievements… which is odd because generally speaking I am not an achievement driven person… at least not unless there is a mount or pet associated with it.

While I was roaming around Tanaan Jungle I suddenly decided that I wanted to kill the rares that I somehow missed along the way. That lead to me getting the Jungle Hunter achievement for killing 25 different rares. Then something inside of me was like… why stop there… and I looked up what the achievement was for killing everything. Last night I sorted out how to get the last couple I was missing and wound up completing the Jungle Stalker achievement for killing all 60 different named rare mobs in Tanaan Jungle. What is so weird about this is the fact that there is absolutely nothing in it for me… no title, no mount, no pet… none of the things I normally chase after. I just suddenly decided I wanted to do it… and then did it because it was something that existed. Now part of me wants to go around killing all of the named rare mobs in all of the different zones of Warlords… and then maybe Pandaria as well. Ultimately I have zero clue why this is suddenly compelling to me… because there are lots more productive uses of my time. However World of Warcraft, especially running around older content is sort of the pinnacle of “comfort gaming”. I have also been running a lot of older raids attempting to complete various cosmetic sets… that I will honestly probably never wear. There is just something enjoyable at this very moment about checking things off of a list.

I often times have some of the most fun in World of Warcraft when the game is in the lull state at the end of an expansion. I am in no rush to complete anything and not attempting to keep up with anyone else that happens to be progressing faster than I am. I only casually care about raiding, or I have already completed the raid content and shift into a sort of permanently piddling mode of play. Whatever the case it feels like I have generated this artificial bubble of lull, to where things really are not effecting me in any serious way. Sure I am actually raiding again… but doing so in a super casual manner and largely doing content that folks have on farm just for the sake of hanging out with my raider friends. Even though I know in the back of my head that we are going to continue getting a drip of content for awhile now… I am largely okay pretending it is the end. I seem to be able to play more freely and pull random goals out of the air and work towards them. While it would be awesome to get some dungeoning in every now and then… I am happy with not feeling like I am letting someone down by not grinding seriously towards some long term objective. I realize that as soon as Stormblood launches… I will be back in the rat race and trying to make sure I am as well geared as possible to be able to tackle all of the new content. However for the moment I am enjoying this enhanced state of chill.

Book Challenge #91: The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

May 24, 2017 by Grace

I’ve been reading at what feels like a pretty good pace, and so it is challenge time once again! This is #91 on the list, The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury published in 1951.

This is the second book in a row that made me wonder how the heck it ended up on this list. Unlike the last one, this one isn’t mediocre or out-of-genre. It just isn’t a novel. The Illustrated Man is a collection of short stories, tied together loosely through the construct of the titular illustrated man, whose moving tattoos tell stories that play out every night. The illustrated man concept is a neat wrapper, but it didn’t fit all that well with the general theme of space stories over most of the book. Overall it was enjoyable, but this book feels weird to have on this list. Although now I’m really interested in a “top 100 sci-fi short story collections” list because I would read the hell out of that.

Since it is a collection it is a bit difficult to pin down any general thoughts on this one. I enjoy Bradbury’s style and there’s some nice thought-provoking tales in here. Some of the writing feels dated at times, and occasionally suffers from the curse of “this feels really cliched now but it probably wasn’t as much of a cliche when it was written”. Many of the stories are also very grim, so much so that this collection could instead be called “Many new and awful ways to die in space.” Even when the content is harsh the stories are usually thoughtful, and often contain a humanity that often gets lost in short fiction like this. Too many times short stories can be more about the twist or “aha!” moment than about characters or places, but some of these stories combat that nicely. One of my favorites from this collection is about a family where the father is a spacer and the mother acts like he is already dead to shield herself from what she believes is his inevitable death out in the stars. There’s still a twist but by the time you get there you at least understand a bit about this family and how they survive with each other.

TL;DR: A nice collection of Bradbury’s short stories, in which many people die in space.

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Rating: 4/5 stars

Verdict: I’d recommend it if you like Bradbury or sci-fi in general from that era. With lots of stories you will likely find something to enjoy.

Next up: The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock

Destiny 2 Feels

May 19, 2017 by Belghast

So yesterday was the big reveal of Destiny 2 gameplay and I have to say I am not disappointed in the least. In fact at this very moment I am feeling inordinate amounts of Destiny love. There were a few things that were released that gave me all the feels. The first is the “Story of Zavala” trailer of sorts that tells the tale of how he came from being a corpse somewhere in the cosmodrome to being the leader of the Vanguard. Unfortunately I have not seen this trailer released separately so you have to catch it about 14 mins into the video that I linked… which is the entire Destiny 2 reveal stream dumped to YouTube. In that trailer you see a young Amanda Holliday getting her first look at a starship, so that in itself was completely priceless. The second cavalcade of feels comes from the gameplay reveal trailer… which appears to be cut from what is going to be one of the intro cinematics showing how the tower falls. There is a moment in the trailer for each class where they get to shine… and I absolutely got all the feels when I saw Zavala call everyone to him and raise a Titan bubble. There are similar badass moments where Ikora Rey Nova Bombs a Cabal transport, and Cayde-6 Golden Gun’s three Cabal troopers.

Destiny 2 is a tale of starting over after a monumental fall from grace, which in itself is probably the best way of dealing with a power reset scenario. Having spent the last week playing through the Fallen Empire storyline in Star Wars the Old Republic… I absolute approve of the notion that sometimes you need to shuffle the deck to freshen up the game. What I like the most about what I saw though is that everything looked and felt like it was still Destiny… just with the Destiny-ness sliders moved all the way to eleven. They reveal that we are going to four new places… but in part I am hoping that given time we will also revisit areas that we have been to before. The maps themselves are supposedly more open world style, or at least the one that was showed reminded me of something on the scale of the Hinterlands from Dragon Age: Inquisition with lots of active hotspots to go explore and find adventures. This is definitely playing to my core desires as a player, but I am also hoping that it still has directed story missions for the folks like Tamrielo who tend to bounce super hard from “now go explore” setups in games.

It sounds like all of the things that made Destiny awesome are coming back, but that they are adding a whole layer of new stuff on top. To be truthful if you look at my characters stats… I have spent a significant number more hours doing patrol missions than literally anything else in the game. Just as a reference according to my Profile on Bungie.net… on my Titan I have played a grand total of 14 days 15 hours… and of that time 7 days 4 hours was in Patrol mode. So giving me a big open world to roam in is absolutely going to serve my interests. However it sounds like the strikes and raids and crucible modes are all coming back with a vengeance with brand new concepts being introduced. It also seems like some of the specs are being tweaked… and I am not sure if each class is getting a wholly new sub class or if we are just losing one and gaining one. Titans for example I know have a Void class that revolves around wielding a shield like Captain America. Warlocks have a new sub class that gives them flaming angel wings and lets them wield a giant flaming sword. So I am not sure if those are in additional to the subs we already have… or if those are now replacing the Defender Titan and Sunsinger Warlock. I mean I am hoping we get something new… but Defender was absolutely one of those sub classes that was super niche and extremely hard to complete “kill with elemental abilities” sort of bounties.

The biggest news from yesterday is that the PC client would be going through Battle.net… which is curiously being referred to as Battle.net and not the Blizzard Launcher. I said before that I would likely never stop calling it Battle.net, and I am guessing maybe they have rethought that branding decision… now that a non-Blizzard game is going to be using that infrastructure. This decision has a lot of positives and as far as I am concerned fairly few negatives. I’ve spent over a decade now cultivating a community inside of the Blizzard franchise games, and knowing that I can carry that ready made community into Destiny is going to be a huge bonus for me. What Bungie is getting from PSN and XBL is an account system that takes care of all of the day to day friend maintenance and messaging functionality and lets them just connect up a game to it. I mean the option that we all probably through they would be taking was to integrate this game with Steam completely, and rely on steam users for profiles. However to be honest, Blizzard does a far better job of policing its own network than Steam does, because quite frankly it is not in the interest of Valve to clamp down too harshly. The only negative here about any of this is that it sounds like the PC client will not be available on day one… and will instead be a console launch only. Ultimately I was going to buy this on PS4 and PC anyways… so this is not a huge deal for me… however it is going to suck for anyone who wants to hold out for the PC.

My dream that is likely to go unrealized is that I could have a single set of character spread across all of the platforms. I am perfectly okay with purchasing a PC client, PS4 client, and Xbox One client… and not necessarily being able to cross play between them. However I would love if my characters which are attached to my Bungie account carried over and worked on each platform. Let me play with my PC friends, PS4 friends and Xbox friends with the characters I have spent so much time building. I mean I managed to get my Xbox One character up to 370 light… but that feels pittiful compared to my stable of three 400 light characters on the PS4 side, each with access to a vault full of awesome stuff. Compared to the 14 days on PSN… I have only played 21 hours of the Xbox One gameplay because not having all of my toys was always a major set back. Since the characters are bound to the Bungie account… they could absolutely make this thing happen. They just need the will to do so. So I have hopes and dreams… but I am fully expecting them to get dashed in the long run. At this point however I am just riding the hype train and so freaking ready for this game to come out.