Hey Folks! There is a thing that I occasionally do on my blog where I run down what I have been playing lately. There are games that I spend time in that don’t necessarily make it to the level of writing about. Regularly Playing has always served as a time for me to update the good ole sidebar of the blog and talk about the things that I am spending time exploring. It is also a time for me to push aside the games that for whatever reason I am just not that into right now. You have a lot of games that make their way back into the rotation, so when I say goodbye it is very rarely forever.
In theory this is a thing that I intend to do every month… but we are living in this time where it still feels like it SHOULD by all rights be March. I think this is going to go down in history as the “Lost Year” because it feels like we are all still very much on pause waiting for things to improve. I expect a significant amount of shake up given that it has been a little over two months since my last update.
To Those Remaining
Diablo III – PC and Switch
Oh Diablo, my sweet Diablo… I can’t ever seem to quit you. This game probably spends the most time on this list, especially now that it exists in switch form. While I am finished with the current PC season, I do still fairly regularly pop it open from bed on the switch and chip away at the achievements there. What can I say that I have not already said a dozen times. I just hope I like Diablo IV even half as much as I love Diablo III.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
Oh precious baby, you are hanging by a thread. I’ve been back a bit of late for the Yo-Kai watch event, but even that has mostly just been something to do while watching something on television. I know there is a whole new story arc that I need to play through since the 5.3 patch has landed finally. I will do that at some point but I am just not overly excited about Final Fantasy XIV right now. I wish I was because it truly is a wonderful game, but I am not sure what changed in me that struggles to latch onto the MMORPG gameplay experience for very long. I find myself being a strict soloist in the MMO space right now, and as a result I never quite fully buy into the good aspects of the culture and the gameplay offerings. I wish I could get over my fear of doing content with other human beings that I seem to have developed.
World of Warcraft – Retail and Beta – PC
I am not what you would call actively playing this game, but every so often I decide to poke my head in and work on leveling some of my alts. During this lull in the expansion I have leveled one of everything horde side by the Shaman, Priest and Rogue. I’ve been most recently working on the Shaman who is in Pandaria and I believe a few levels away from 100? This is often times the character that I play while we are podcasting, or if I am watching some show because World of Warcraft requires a bare minimum of interactivity to play it on the level I am playing it. I still get a stupid amount of enjoyment from its simple mechanics and my ability to just turn my brain off and rely entirely upon muscle memory.
To The New and Returning
Avengers – PC
I super did not expect to be playing this game right now. I had a lot of issues early on with it, but it turns out that I was more or less bit in the butt by my own shenanigans. There are still some minor issues of mouse and camera not exactly working in the way that I would prefer but it is extremely playable and the story is really solid. In fact I think at this point I am mostly playing because the story is extremely enjoyable. The game hits a deep uncanny valley at times because I think they are trying to shoot halfway between the more traditional comic appearance of the characters and that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve gotten used to it however and once I did the story being told has become pure joy.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS4
I have been on a bit of a single player narrative game kick of late, and I have been playing a significant amount of Ghosts of Tsushima. I’ve not made it past the first part of the game, because I keep roaming around and killing baddies. I am more or less following the Samurai path where I present a challenge and then proceed to whittle down the rest of the masses after taking out their strongest. I love this game a lot, and the only thing that would have made it better is if I were playing on the PC with a Mouse and Keyboard. I’ve been a bit distracted the last week or so, but I am hoping over the extended weekend that I can return to this and keep moving forward.
Hades – PC
I am not entirely certain that this game has ever made the list, but I have had it in my arsenal for awhile now. I have a deep love for the types of games that Supergiant creates. Even when I don’t mechanically enjoy the game like was the case with Pyre, I really appreciate the story that is being told. Hades is effectively a blend of Diablo and a Rogue Lite game and involves escaping from the underworld, and powering yourself along the way to make that possible. It is a game or repetition because you are absolutely going to die over and over and over in your journey, each time starting back at the start and each time carrying some progress along with you. This has been in early access but we are starting to near an official launch, so I have been playing it again in anticipation. Really solid game.
New World – PC
I’ve not participated in two test events of New World and I am super happy to finally be able to start talking about it. The last long preview event that is wrapping up I believe today had no NDA and as a result I have been able to openly discuss it on the blog. As it stands I am so ready for this game to launch and to start being able to play it in earnest. I am hoping the next event is an Open Beta so that folks who did not pre-order can give it a shot and see if it works for them. This is definitely the type of game that I am going to want to find an active company to play in, and that does not mean that I am sold on the notion of leading one. I’m good at recruiting people, but I don’t seem to be good at keeping people engaged… myself included. So more than likely I will be looking for a company to join that would be open to any friends that I have who are also interested.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, PC, and Switch
This is going to be a bit of a generic heading because I have been poking around in a lot of “retro games”. The thing is… I find it weird calling these game retro, because they are from my childhood. It is moments like this that I remember just how damned old I am at this point. Whatever you want to call them I have been back on a kick of trying to get my closet full of older systems and cartridges up and running on modern display technology. I’ve also purchased a Retro Freak console, which allows me to do a bunch of nifty things including dump rom and save games from cartridges and apply translation patches on the fly. The next project is to try and get my Neo Geo CD system up and running again and maybe apply the mod that replaces the very slow CD Rom with an SD Card interface.
To Those Departing
Destiny 2 – PC
I am not sure where we went wrong boo, I’m just not playing you. I have no clue what is up but for whatever reason I just haven’t been interested in playing Destiny 2 in this current season. I am not sure if it is the impending gear sunset or the fact that they are “vaulting” content to remove it from the game, but whatever the case I am just turned off right now. I think games should get larger over time not shrink constantly, and I hate the FOMO aspect of seasonal play. The truth however is just that I have not been interested in playing a shooter lately, and this last few months has been largely marked by me playing more single player and narrative driven content. I am sure I will be back when the expansion launches in November and have a grand ole time.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
You know that mission that AggroChat folks have been on about playing Guild Wars 2 and getting others to play it as well? For whatever reason it never sunk its hooks properly into me. I still don’t fully understand why this game that on paper should be something I am deeply into… never quite seems to work for me. There is just something about the gameplay loop that I don’t find as enjoyable as I should. The story content also never really hooked me, so while I keep trying to revisit this game… it never really does it for me. I am sure I will be back at some point because I am a glutton for punishment with a very short memory.
Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC
I can’t fully explain what happened here and why I stopped playing this game, but it happened. I am not even sure what distracted me. I just know that I have not logged in for a long while other than to convert to the Steam client. I am sure I will return because I was having quite a bit of fun with it. I also know that I was only a few levels away from hitting the cap at the time, and that there is a raised cap now that we have entered Chapter 4. I think I mostly got distracted by a string of single player experiences like Death Stranding.
Torchlight III – PC
I really do want to like this game, but I have not been all that into of it late. I think the core problem I have with the third iteration is that there just isn’t really a class that I enjoy. In Torchlight there was the Destroyer that I played a ton of, and in Torchlight II it was the Engineer. Both were big and bashy melee characters and right now in the third game there are two characters that CAN be played that way… but they both sorta feel fiddly. So I have been splitting my time between the Forge and the Railmaster…. and to be truthful neither of them feel the way that I want them to feel. I know Torchlight is a game that tries to cast aside the traditional Mage, Rogue, Warrior, and Cleric blend of classes… but I mostly just wish they had proper representation of those archetypes. My preference is to play something akin to the Diablo Barbarian or Crusader and they just don’t really have that represented.
Ships Passing in the Night
Death Stranding – PC
Death Stranding was a phenomenal experience. I legit get emotional just thinking about it. This is the game that I needed to play at the time in which I played it. It has become this extremely relevant allegory for the time that we are living in. I am not sure this is a game that everyone would enjoy, because the whole courier aspect of it that I found enjoyable could be pure tedium for someone else. The story being told though is really good and if nothing else you should probably watch a play through of it at some point.
Horizon Zero Dawn -PC
I had been anxiously awaiting the release of Horizon Zero Dawn for the PC, and when it came out I burned through it like wildfire. I think I put in a solid 50 hours in a very short period of time and cracking this open and revisiting it all was truly magical. I love Aloy and the world of Horizon, and I am anxiously awaiting the sequel. This is pretty much the reason why I will be buying a PlayStation 5 as soon as the pre-orders open. If you have never played Horizon Zero Dawn, you owe it to yourself to experience the game and the bow combat just works so much better with a Mouse and Keyboard.
Summary
I guess this is what happens when I wait almost three months between updates, there is a lot of change. I’ve bounced a few things off the list that I am almost certain I will revisit. Hell to be truthful what usually happens is just writing about them ends up making me want to log back in again. I know we have the launch of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 that will be eating some of my time, and I would really like to restart Jedi Fallen Order but this time play it with Mouse and Keyboard. Additionally I really want to play through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which has been on my list for awhile. In between those I will be wrapping up Avengers main story and seeing if I like the group content or not, and probably poking my head into New World each time a new test event opens. All the while the backlog continues to grow, but I have gotten fairly used to knowing I will never quite conquer it.
The post Regularly Playing: September 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This morning we are going to go on an adventure, or at least travel down a rabbit hole. Be warned that today’s post is going to involve a heavy dose of speculation. There are going to be things that I just don’t know and could not find the answers to, but drew my own conclusions. Like so many of these adventures that I occasionally go on, it starts with a random thought that I carelessly posted on twitter.
Color Coding Loot
Color coding loot as a concept is a brilliant one, because it quickly allows players to filter which bundles of stats are worth paying attention to and which should just be sold or broken down immediately. As someone who plays an excessive number of games that throw loot at you constantly, they are invaluable and help me do a first pass before actually sitting down and inspecting whether or not an item is worth keeping.
The thing is… we have ended up in this situation where most games use effectively the same system with a few minor tweaks here or there. This is a random assortment of games that have color coded loot rarity systems. As you can clearly see there is a pattern here and an agreed upon language that we have landed upon as to what each color means. The funny thing is this same logic applies to many other gaming related spaces, for example when I set up a discord my default is going to be to land upon a white > green > blue > purple > gold scale for hierarchy as far as ranks go. The same was true when I was in the business of building forums.
The Popularization
This lead to a search of what game popularized this concept. This was a fairly short search if we are willing to accept Wikipedia as the authoritative source. To keep you from having to click through and read the entire post on loot in video games, here is the relevant bit.
Loot may often be assigned to tiers of rarity, with the rarer items being more powerful and more difficult to obtain. The various tiers of rarity are often indicated by particular colors that allow a player to quickly recognize the quality of their loot. The concept of color-coded loot rarity was popularized with the 1996 game Diablo, whose designer, David Brevik, took the idea from the roguelike video game Angband.Wikipedia – Loot (video games) article
So there we have the most basic answer. The game that popularized this concept was Diablo and this style of loot coding has carried forward in the ARPG genre and can more or less still be seen today in games like Path of Exile or Wolcen. This however is deeply unsatisfying because even when the color coding was expanded by Diablo II and Diablo III you still end up with a vastly different scheme than what we have come to accept as the bog standard loot coloration. I feel like we still don’t really have our true answer yet of how we ended up where we are on what colors mean what things.
The Consider System
Now is the point where we start drifting into wild speculation. There are however a few facts that one should take into account. The game that I most closely tie the “standard” loot scheme to is World of Warcraft. I believe in my heart of hearts that its popularity is what has lead to the wide adoption of a specific meaning for each color. However we don’t really know how they landed upon the specific scale that they did. We do know a few things about the early designers of that game and its itemization. In many cases they were hardcore Everquest players, with Alex Afrasiabi and Jeff Kaplan in particular being the leaders of high end raiding guilds. So we know for a fact there is a specific color scale that they would both be intimately aware of.
Everquest was a game that did not give you clear statistics for the monsters you were encountering. It wasn’t like you could highlight the mob and get a specific level number to indicate how difficult an encounter might be. Instead you had something called the /consider command, that would give you a rough approximation both in text and color coding how difficult an encounter might be. So for example if you typed /con on a mob that was significantly lower than you it would spit back a message in green saying “looks like a reasonably safe opponent”. If you considered a significantly higher encounter it would spit back in bright red “what would you like your tombstone to say?”.
As a long time Everquest player, this scale became so ingrained that we just referred to encounters by the color that they considered. You might brag to your friends that you were able to easily solo yellows, or that you managed to kite a red. You also might complain that you ended up getting swarmed by greens and took a stupid death due to the glitchy aggro of a specific zone. It is within this consider system that I think we start to shape up what is the standard going forward.
The Dark Age of Camelot Consider System
Alex Afrasiabi, better known as Furor to the old timers… was the leader of a rather notorious raid guild called Fires of Heaven. I started my Everquest career playing on Veeshan, the server they were resident on and was quite aware of some of their exploitative tactics for coming up with creative solutions to encounters. During one of these such encounters it earned Furor and practically the entire raiding group a permanent ban from Everquest. I believe it was during this time that a number of Fires of Heaven folk set up shop in Dark Age of Camelot, which was the first true competitor for Everquest and offered a significant number of tweaks to the template. Again we are going into the territory of speculation here as I have no specific knowledge that Furor was among this group, but I believe if my memory serves me that Fires of Heaven had a Midgard guild.
The DAoC consider system is pretty close to that of Everquest, with a few tweaks. For starters there is no specific “even” consider within the system. Things that are Yellow are either on level or above your level. One of the problems with the Everquest system is that Red was a really obtuse consider ranking, especially at low levels. There were times that reds were absolutely something that was reasonably to do with a full group, but it was impossible to tell without the use of Allakhazam whether those mobs were 20 or 40 levels higher than you. In Dark Age of Camelot they fixed this problem by introducing purple as being extremely higher than you, meaning that no really… you were absolutely going to die if you tried this thing.
Another really interesting thing that Dark Age of Camelot did was set usability ranges on your gear. if you used an item significantly higher than your current level, it would wear down more quickly given that you “lacked the skill” to use the item. As a result the items in the game used this same consider color system to indicate how far or above an item was to you, giving you some indication of whether or not you should be using a weapon and when you should probably start upgrading it. As far as I am aware this is the first case this specific color palette was applied to specific loot items.
World of Warcraft Viral Spread
As I said at the beginning of this nonsense, I am absolutely certain that games like Borderlands use this color scale because World of Warcraft popularized it. World of Warcraft is the very first example I could find of using purple as the rarity immediately following blue for example. My theory is that Diablo had already popularized and codified the concept that loot should have colors denoting rarity, and since very seasoned Everquest and potentially DAoC veterans were over the itemization… that we ended up using that very familiar color scale as their gauge. I feel like I am bolstered in this notion by looking at the original launch color rarity scale. Red in the Everquest consider system was used to indicate the end of the scale, and this was also the original color of artifact gear. Yellow at some point became gold, maybe because in later revisions of the DAoC con system Orange was introduced to wedge between Yellow and Red.
Today we have a slightly different looking color scale with Artifact and Heirloom meaning very specific things and as such being outside of the actual rarity scale. Once World of Warcraft became a cultural event, this same loot scale spread from game to game until now it is just effectively the standard language for quickly indicating how special an item might be. Do I know for certain that anything I just said is the truth? No… not really. Like I said at the beginning of this, today’s was a journey of speculation. Do I think that my theory is likely? Yeah I really do think that Diablo popularized the concept of loot color coding and that the World of Warcraft Standard was deeply influenced by the Consider system from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.
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Last night I took a break from attempting to halt the Mongol invasion of Japan and returned to Azeroth. I have three characters horde side that are not 120. Weirdly they also represent most of my allied races characters aka my Maghar Shaman, Void Elf Priest and Vulpera Rogue. I made a massive push and leveled so many things to 120 in such a short period of time, that I am now sorta keeping these as a low key side project for when I need equally low key levels of activity. World of Warcraft is comfort gaming that I can more or less play in my sleep at this point, and sometimes you just need that in your life.
I am however getting somewhat tired of Borean Tundra. It is significantly more efficient than Howling Fjord but it also lags a bit and has a few quests that I absolutely cannot stand. I am standing where I am because I was lured over to complete a quest without reading what it was. I abandoned the quest where you load a mule up with wreckage and then try and get it back to base without losing anything. I just cannot be bothered by that nonsense and as a result I think I am probably going to be seeking out a command board to get the starter quest to go elsewhere in Northrend.
I am not a completionist at all and I will happily abandon quests left and right, especially when I am playing an alt. I’m 76 currently and I believe the elevator stops when I get to 80 and will ultimately transition over into I believe a choice of Pandaria or Cataclysm. As frustratingly gated as it is, I do enjoy the content in Pandaria significantly more as it has aged. In fact my overall opinion of that expansion has also increased significantly with age. Strangely Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King on the other hand are content blocks that I don’t look forward to in quite the way that I once did because the game has evolved since those days as has my attention span.
In my normal tradition of discovering things years too late… my wife and I have recently started a watch through of Schitt’s Creek. I had heard of the show but never got around to checking it out, and quite honestly I had no clue what the Pop Channel was. It turns out it is the channel formerly known as Prevue and later the TV Guide Channel… which is peak levels of irony since I used to work for the parent company during the early 2000s. I spent New Years of 2000 on the roof of the corporate headquarters since we had an all hands order as we prepared for all of the post apocalyptic things that were supposed to be happening.
It is a good show but I am not entirely certain if I can pinpoint WHY I find it so funny. I think on one hand it is that Schitt’s Creek is not dissimilar to the tiny towns that both my wife and I grew up in. I know the people that are represented on screen and serve as a foil to the Rose family. David and Stevie are without a doubt my favorite characters, but I do admit it was a little weird seeing Chris Elliot playing Roland without devolving to full Cabin Boy levels of nonsense. I think the series does a good job of creating humorous fish out of water situations without going all the way in painting the local folk as idiots. I ran like hell as soon as I could get out of my small town upbringing, and am still in many ways running from it… but that said I still have certain nostalgia for the cast of non-sequitur characters that small towns create.
As of last night we are about halfway through season three and I am hoping by the time we get there the sixth and final season will be available on netflix.
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So yesterday I made a post that is a bit out of the ordinary for my blog. Largely it was a thought experiment about whether or not we would actually get consoles this season. In a normal year I would take that both companies had announced a Holiday launch to be a done deal. However 2020 is the year when everything has been cancelled, sometimes rescheduled and often times cancelled again. We are not playing under normal circumstances and there are likely unforeseen supply chain issues that are being impacted by Covid-19. However regardless of that a Sony show happened yesterday and as they suggested there was no major PlayStation 5 news, but instead some discussion about things that had already been announced.
If you are curious about the entire show, then you can check out this link that should forward you right to the beginning of the broadcast. Of the things shown, I think Crash Bandicoot 4 was probably the most interesting to me. We have been in this time of reboots and re-imaginings, so I find it extremely interesting to get an official sequel to Crash Bandicoot: Warped from 1998. The gameplay looks to have evolved as well and I am pretty excited to get to play it. Additionally it appears that the game will be coming out for PlayStation 4 and won’t actually be a PS5 launch title. Availability to more players is always going to be a good thing, especially considering I think the PS5 will be in extremely short availability this year.
We also got to see more information about Godfall and while it still sorta looks like if Skyforge and Destiny had a kid, it appears there are also elements of Warframe factored in with your ability to find and unlock new “suits” with their own unique abilities. The designer giving the demo went out of his way to state that there would be no micro-transactions and that the game has all of its content on day one. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. I am hoping that means the game is something more akin to Diablo 3 in the way it grows and progresses, but even D3 released a Reaper of Souls expansion and a Necromancer DLC pack. The combat looks fun, so I will likely be checking this out on PC, because it doesn’t seem like the type of game I want to play on a console.
Other than watching the Sony show, I spent the majority of the night piddling around on the Shaman in World of Warcraft. I managed to ding 60 and say goodbye to the old world and move my way into Borean Tundra. I contemplated starting over in Howling Fjord because I like that zone significantly better, but the last character I ran over there seemed to level significantly more slowly. The quests are spread out and the hubs are less conducive to batching things up. I am still really enjoying the Elemental Shaman and up until this point I don’t feel squishy, which really helps the enjoyment of a caster.
All of that said… forward momentum on the Shaman is probably going to grind to a halt given that Horizon Zero Dawn complete edition releases on PC at some point this morning. I was able to log in and pre-load last night and I can see this more or less eating the rest of my free time. I played through the original game on PlayStation 4, but never really touched the DLC. My hope is that by replaying the experience of transitioning into the DLC will feel more seamless. I also think playing with a mouse and keyboard is going to make the bow combat feel significantly better. I’ve heard some weird issues with performance, so I am hoping that gets patched quickly. I’ve been running Death Stranding which uses the same engine so my hope is that I can at least get it to look as good as a PS4 Pro.
So… what does your weekend look like? Will you be dipping your toes into Horizon Zero Dawn? Drop me a line below with what you have planned.
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