October 2024

Posted on by Nimgimli

The end of this month has really snuck up on me; it’s been a weird one. October 2024 was the month that COVID finally caught up to me and it really threw things into disarray. Ironically, I’m about 90% certain that I caught it by going to a local drugstore for a vaccine. I’m basically a recluse and it is rare that I go into a building with other people, and in this case there was a clearly sick 20-something young woman sharing the waiting nook and and ‘get the shot’ room with me. She was wheezing and sneezing and clearly ill. Stupid me hadn’t thought to bring a mask and she wasn’t wearing one, of course. A few days later the symptoms started showing. A few days after that, @partpurple started showing symptoms

Anyway the good news is I didn’t wind up in the hospital or anything, but it really disrupted my gaming for the month. I had been doing a lot of PC gaming but COVID sent me retreating to the couch and the consoles. I mostly worked and slept for a good two weeks but in the short times I was awake and free I worked my way through the Diablo IV expansion, and then I was looking for something cozy to play. I tried a number of games but knew what I really wanted and that was My Time at Portia, a game I’d played in the past but had never finished. I owned it on PC but not on console.

That prompted me to finally get my Steam Deck working again. It had been busted since last winter. I finally hooked it up to an external monitor and it was sitting at some kind of boot menu. I got past that and everything started working EXCEPT the screen. As long as it was hooked to an external monitor it worked great, but that kind of misses the point.

They say that one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, but that is what I did, looking up various combos of button presses to cause the Steam Deck to reset itself or something. And eventually it worked but there’s no way I could ever repeat the steps because I just lost track of how many times I held 2 or 3 buttons for 10 or 15 or 30 seconds, but suddenly the screen lit up and things have been fine since.

I started playing My Time At Portia on the Steam Deck but soon realized my COVID-tearing eyes weren’t up to the task. Then I tried using Steam Link to play on the TV and that worked, sort of. I think my issue is that my PC has a 1440P ultra widescreen monitor and the TV is a 4K. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it but the result was the game showed up on the TV with letterboxing bars all around. It worked but didn’t look great. Finally I broke down and just bought My Time At Portia on the PS5 and started enjoying that.

Then work blew up and the last two weeks has seen plenty of 12 (or more) hours days, just putting the final touches on an overall pretty crappy month. Also it is Halloween and 80F so.. man, October has sucked!

Playing

The only game I spent any significant amount of time with was :

The Plucky Squire — I mentioned this one last month, but I finished it early this month (before COVID). I really enjoyed it until the very end. For most of the time I spent playing it was this charming and chill experience. Exploring, puzzle solving and some mini-games that weren’t that hard. But then at the very end of the game the mini-games all returned in a much harder variation. One in particular, a rhythm game (which I suck at) really frustrated me. I got through it all and enjoyed the ending credits but it really dampened any enthusiasm to replay it or trophy hunt. In the end it took me 18 hours to get through, of which like 17 were just amazingly fun and charming, and then an hour of frustration at the very end!

Watching

We’ve been watching a bunch of supernatural stuff that originated on AMC but are now on Netflix. We finished A Discovery of Witches, which was fine. Then The Mayfair Witches which was a little more creepy/spooky and I liked that one better. Now we’re onto Interview with the Vampire which so far I’m liking more than the old Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise movie, which @partpurple insisted I watch before we started the series.

I also finished Station Eleven which I’d started last month, and which I enjoyed. It felt like a different kind of post apocalypse story, I guess.

And that’s pretty much all I remember. I watched a LOT of YouTube and specifically Critical Role sessions because they are so long. I tended to just sleep/doze through them. For real I was sleeping like 20 hours a day on weekends when I could get away with it, and I’m STILL sleeping a lot more than 2 weeks since I first showed symptoms.

Reading

I finally finished The Tower of Swallows, one of the Witcher novels. There are two more in the series that have been translated. Not sure if there are more or if the author is still writing them. But I finally accepted the fact that I just don’t enjoy them very much. Love the games, loved the Netflix show, but the books just don’t hit right with me. There’s a TON of world building but the actual plot moves so very slowly that I just kind of lose track of it.

Now I’m reading Kahayatle by Elle Casey. I found it in our Kindle library and imagine @partpurple bought it at some point. It is terrible. The writer isn’t very good; I think she self-published these. The premise is some disease killed off all the adults and young children so we now have a world-wide Lord of the Flies situation and for some reason most of the population seems to have turned into cannibals, or “Canners” as they call them for some weird reason. I keep telling myself I have to stop reading it because it is written so badly, but at the same time it is so ‘lite’ that the pages fly by. I think it is part of a trilogy and I assume we own all the books so we’ll see how long it takes me to give up on them.

I’m not a writer so I don’t feel qualified to critique Elle Casey but there is just a vibe I get from new writers where they haven’t learned the art of ‘sketching’ with words, so they tend to over explain small details, almost like they’re writing a movie script or something. So every time a character sticks their tongue out or makes a ‘raspberry’ at another character… I know the author is trying to convey that here is a kind of light-hearted moment in the midst of all this awful, but it just feels over-written and over-detailed and comes off feeling fake. I’m not good at describing this feeling because, again, not a writer, but I can sure feel it when I’m reading and it snaps me out of the world.

Melville was able to write super detailed accounts of how things work in the middle of his novels, but in my experience he’s about the only author I know who has mastered this. So when your characters decide to remove a flag from a bicycle, you can just say they removed the flag. You don’t have to show us how they went to find a wrench and how the nut was a little rusted but with some elbow grease it finally came free and it got unscrewed and the flag was removed. We don’t need all those details; our imaginations can fill in all of that.

On the other hand when a character is pinned under a bigger adversary so that one of her arms is trapped under her body, and she gets free by biting her adversary in the crotch, that makes me stop and puzzle out what their position was and how that worked. Like I dunno, you have to pick your details battles, I guess?

Anyway she wrote a bunch of novels and I didn’t so I should just shut up. But I can’t really recommend Kahayatle even though I’m still reading it. 🙂

And that’s October, the month of COVID & couches and too much work and not much else. Here’s to a better November!

 

Finally Figured Out My Issue With Diablo IV

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was a late-bloomer when it came to Diablo IV. I waited for Microsoft to buy Blizzard-Activision and put the game on Game Pass before I ever played it, aside from maybe a beta weekend or something. And when I did it was….fine, I guess?  But it didn’t really hook me like I hoped it would.

I keep going back every new season and I even pre-ordered the new expansion, Vessel of Hatred. Last night I finished running through that storyline, which I actually enjoyed more than the base game campaign (which left so light an impression on me that I couldn’t really tell you what happened except we killed Lillith) and now the game opens up and… I think I’m done.

But I still keep THINKING I should like this more, and most of that is probably based on very fond memories of many long hours playing Diablo and Diablo 2.  Still it has taken me a long time to kind of untangle my thoughts and decide why I don’t vibe with it, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

The lesser reason is that the moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t very interesting. It feels like a ton of sizzle with not a lot of steak. Yeah at first it’s fun to just wreck huge clumps of baddies but, at least when playing solo so you’re not having to coordinate with anyone, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of thought or skill in it. Heck a lot of the time you can’t even SEE your character in all the chaos. Yes, there’s thought and skill that goes into putting together your build, for sure, but once you get that where you like it, you just kind of go through the same rotation over and over, with the only real decision on when to fire off an evade or an ultimate.

That’s pretty true of a lot of MMOs but honestly a lot of MMOs have pretty boring combat when playing solo which is why I generally don’t stick with them for very long, either. Maybe I just have never gotten to the ‘good parts’ of Diablo IV to get to the really interesting boss fights and stuff and I kind of feel like I should at least try to get there, but then there’s the Big Reason to discuss.

The Big Reason I have an issue with D4 is the Season system. A season starts, you roll a new character, and you play that character until the season ends. Then your character (and I always get very attached to my RP characters) goes to the Eternal Realm to languish. Another season starts, tempting you with all kind of shiny goodies to earn, but you need a new character for the new season so you’re starting all over again. As a CASUAL player this drives me nuts because I never feel like I make any progress.

Basically playing Diablo IV feels to me like playing the Beta of a new MMO where characters are wiped after every beta phase, and the game is NEVER going to launch. If I was a dedicated player and wound up finishing each season and maybe maxing out a few characters, this might not feel so bad, but I never get that far. I just don’t play enough (so to be clear, this is a ME problem, not an issue with the game). The only reason I’ve finished the Vessel of Hatred campaign is because I’ve been sick as a dog and laying on the couch needing something mindless to play and D4 was perfect for that.

I guess I just wish there was a way to carry over your characters, or some perks or benefits, from season to season. Or some kind of track in the Eternal Realms that made it seem worthwhile to play there. SOMETHING persistent to hang on to. But as it is, playing Diablo IV for me is like starting a bunch of projects and then having them taken away from me before I can ever finish any of them, and that is super unsatisfying.

Screenshot of Neyrelle from a Diablo IV cut scene
My face when I know the season is about to end and my character is going to the black hole of the Eternal Realm

 

September 2024

Posted on by Nimgimli

Wow, I’m not really sure how to approach the recap this month. I’ve played a little bit of a lot of games; far too many to list them all here without being even more boring than usual. I seem to be following some kind of a zig-zag pattern where I’m either 100% focused on a game or two, or I’m just dipping my toe in everywhere and not making any progress anywhere. I’ve come to be more comfortable with the latter now that most of the stuff I play is either already in my backlog or is arriving via Game Pass or something. In ye olden times too often I’d spend $50 on a game and play it for 2 hours before drifting away, and that was not (fiscally) cool.

Anyway let’s dive in. Gonna break things up by platform this month.

Playing

Playstation

The Plucky Squire — Ideally you stop reading now and just go play this because I wish I’d known nothing about it going in. I’ll tell you that it is colorful and charming and mixes a bunch of game styles in a storybook & toy-filled world. You’ll do top-down (old school) Zelda style fighting, platforming, puzzle-solving and assorted mini-games. Haven’t finished it yet (I’m in Chapter 7 of 10 chapters) but it’s been really good so far. It IS pretty short though; HowLongToBeat says its about 10 hours long.

Screenshot from The Plucky Squire show the character in the surface of some kind of cannister
At one point in our journey there’s a Defender clone mini-game that takes part on the surface of this cannister, and it’s a damned fine Defender clone, too!

Xbox & Xbox Games on PC

Fallout 76 — Having finished up the last Season at level 200 or so, I stepped back for a while and gave Fallout 76 a bit of a rest, but towards the end of the month I started engaging again. Specifically when the new Caravan system dropped. A lot of weapons have been somewhat nerfed which has upset the community but honestly I’m finding I’m enjoying myself more now that things aren’t all dying from a single shot.

Red Dead Redemption 2 — My Xbox was running low on storage space so I sorted games by size and RDR2 was the biggest at 123 GB. I fired it up and found my last save was from 2019 (!) so I, of course, decided to start fresh. It’s kind of amazing how well this game holds up. It’s an Xbox One game but it really looks as good as most “new gen” games. That all said, I haven’t gotten very far and the game is so old and so popular that I don’t have much to say about it other than that I’m having fun.

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition — After bouncing off the PC version, I started playing on the Xbox where the experience is much better!

PC

Throne & Liberty — This is the new F2P MMO that launches on October 1st. I’m embarrassed to admit I bought early access “accidentally.” I’d played the beta earlier this summer and was thrilled by how pretty the game looked (I was pretty newly returned to PC gaming at the time) and “pre-ordered” the game in a fit of enthusiasm. At the time I didn’t even notice the game was going to be F2P and I was just buying an early access package! Once I realized my mistake I SHOULD have canceled but didn’t because… I dunno why honestly.

I have buyer’s remorse. The game really is pretty but it is also really intended for hardcore group/guild play, so I don’t expect I’ll play it for long; waiting for the normal launch and pumping 10 or 15 hours for free would have been the right move. Ah well, live and maybe learn. But I’m more interested in returning to New World when the Avernum re-launch (?) happens. But yeah, Throne & Liberty is VERY pretty and…um… is an MMO. I don’t really have much more to say about it!

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition — A game I booted up on a whim wound up ‘sticking’ for the first time. It took some fiddling to get it to run OK. It never really ran well, and I don’t think that had to do with the power of my machine or anything. I’m no game developer but I wonder if the engine just wasn’t build to handle the horsepower of today’s CPUs and GPUs. No matter what setting I tweaked, turning always felt a little rough even though the actual frame rate would hold steady; eventually it got to be too much so I dropped it. (But see above in the Xbox section.)

World of Warcraft — I made slow but steady progress for most of the month, but just this past weekend I finished the Dragonflight main campaign which unlocked a lot of new systems and made everything much more enjoyable for me. My new character is at level 55 now; 15 more levels until I can jump over to The War Within and that shouldn’t really take too long to achieve. Feeling much better about WoW since finishing that DF campaign.

World of Warcraft cut scene screenshot showing dragons opening a portal

Guild Wars 2 — Having trouble here. I’m still in Living World Season 1. My character is at max level so going through Living World isn’t really progressing me much so I’m just playing for the story. I should just move on but I’m stubborn.

Watching

Terminator Zero (Netflix) — This is an anime set in the Terminator universe that we all (OK maybe not ALL) know and love. I’d heard good things about it but the first couple of episodes were a bit of a disappointment as they felt so similar to the first couple of movies. Terminator is sent back to stop someone in the past. Resistant member is sent back to stop the Terminator. The only significant difference was that this one was set in Japan. But I stuck with it and starting about the 3rd episode it became its own thing and got really good. It has terminator fighting action, questions about time travel and paradoxes and such, and even examines how different people react to robots, with some more than willing to anthropomorphize them and others seeing them as just things. It’s short, like every other new show on streaming services, and has an actual conclusion while leaving plenty of threads to follow for a second season, which I hope we get. Recommended, but do be prepared to give it 3 or 4 episodes to start to gel.

A Discovery of Witches (Netflix) — I think I mentioned this one last month, but we finished it up (there are 3 seasons) and it came to a pretty good conclusion. This is still not really my wheelhouse but urban fantasy fan @partpurple liked it a lot. One of the odd things is that there are 3 “Creature” species in the show: vampires, witches and demons. But we NEVER find out what makes a demon a demon. We never see any of them do anything supernatural-ish. I’m sure the books do a better job and I’m kind of trying to get PartPurple to read them so she can fill me in. Also if there is a downside to being a vampire in this world, they never showed it. LOL but here I am complaining after saying we watched it all and it was OK. But it was OK!

Rings of Power (Amazon) — We went back and re-watched Season 1 before moving on to Season 2. I actually liked Season 1 quite a bit more in a second viewing but we’ve JUST started Season 2 so don’t have much to say about it yet.

Station Eleven (Max) — This is a post-apocalypse show that posits a plague with a 99% fatality rate and what happens in the aftermath. I’d never heard of it and it maybe hit a little too close to home when it came out in 2021! So far it’s been really good though. There is (again, so far) nothing fantastical happening here. No zombies or anything. Just the collapse of civilization with a heavy “theater kids” angle. Yes, it’s a little weird. But good so far (I’m about half-way through.)

Reading

Still plodding through The Tower of Swallows, which is I think the 4th Witcher book? This is going to be the end for me though; as much as I love The Witcher games and The Witcher Netflix shows, the books are just not grabbing me. Y’know what they feel like? Imagine The Lord of the Rings if all the appendix info was in the body of the books. There’s just so much world-building going on, but not much plot. I can see why CD Projekt Red picked the world to set a game in as there is a TON of lore but it’s all shared in giant lumps of text while our characters sit around a fire toasting marshmallows for chapters at a time. I’m going to finish this one and there is I believe one more in the series but I don’t think I can take another novel full of fictional history.

So that’s September. Plan for October is New World Avernum, more World of Warcraft and… who knows what else? I’ll probably continue to flit about and not make much progress anywhere. But as long as I’m having fun, right? Hope you all have a great month!

The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 3 Addendum

Posted on by Nimgimli

Before I run out of weekend I just wanted to post a really quick update to my last WoW Journal post. No sooner had I posted that than I logged into WoW and turned in a quest (I’d already completed the work but I sometimes like to quit just before a quest turn-in to get that boost when I start my next section) and it turns out it was the last quest of the main campaign.

So Dragonflight is completed though I’m guessing maybe there is a Raid or something to put the absolute final period to it because the Dragon Queen mentioned there was one more rock to be activated but didn’t ask me to help.

Anyway with the quest line completed WoW now unlocks something they call Adventure Mode which as far as I can tell is similar to what classic used to be. You are now free to move about the cabin. World quests unlock, faction quests/collecting seems to unlock. It’s now a matter of going out and doing what you want.

I pretty much IMMEDIATELY started having more fun. Did some world quests, did a Follower Dungeon (which I love and which maybe deserve their own post) and did some “little guy” quests which I often find fun and charming. At the top of this post is a screenshot from the last quest I did this weekend. These two little Tuskarr (walrus-people) kids are trying to befriend a lost, starving gnoll pup and they needed some fish to befriend him with. So I went fishing. And the gnoll cub got a new home. Hope that all works out for them.

But I enjoy these kinds of street-level heroics.

Anyway, that’s it. Just wanted to say that for me at least, WoW gets WAY more interesting once you finish the campaign. I’ve got about 15 levels to get through before I can move on but I suspect they’ll go quick. I made I think 5 since I posted earlier today.

The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 3

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s been nearly a month since Part 2 of this journal. I bet you thought I’d given up on it, or given up on World Of Warcraft. I’ve come close a few times, but not yet. Having pre-paid for 3 months of time has done what I’d hoped it would do and kind of convinced me to keep going.

The reason I’m back writing is that finally, just in the past couple of days, I’ve really started to enjoy myself. My character is about level 50 now and around 23 hours old.

So in my last journal I talked about how WoW hadn’t really been grabbing me and as mentioned, that continued to be the case up until just recently. I think I’ve finally figured out why and it is partially self-inflicted by FOMO and partially just the way Dragonflight is structured. (Maybe all the expansions have been structured like this but Dragonflight is the first I’ve played (almost, so far) all the way through.)

So quick refresher, I started a new character, and did Exiles Reach to get to level 10. That was fine and fun and really short. Then I wound up in Stormwind and from there headed off to Dragon Land. The fact that I have no idea what the correct name of Dragon Land is, and that I can’t name a single zone there, is our first clue.

I first started playing Dragonflight the same way I used to play what we now call “Classic WoW.” I took every quest I saw and got ready to grind levels. But there are a LOT of quests and what I really wanted to be playing was The War Within which folk kept sharing stories about. I also heard from friends who’d hit level 70 in Dragonflight and then just got shunted over to The War Within against their will.

I figured if I was going to invest in Dragonflight I wanted to see all of it before level 70 happened so I stopped doing side quests and just did the main campaign quest. That started a whirlwind tour of Dragon Land. I moved through the various parts of the island so quickly that I had no sense of place and no connection to the land or the story. Once I got a flying mount, I just took to the skies and flew from quest giver to quest location, did some super trivial content, and flew back.

The story so far is…there are dragons and they come in various colors and some are good and others are bad and we’re helping the good dragons fight the bad ones. I’m not sure why the bad ones are bad exactly. There are 6 limbed dragons (4 legs, 2 arms) and 4 limbed dragons (4 legs, no arms.) I’m not sure why. And there are dragons that we just ride on and they seem to just be beasts? The 4 limbed intelligent dragons are only dragons sometimes, other times they take on the form of one of the WoW races though I’m not sure why. I guess to get arms? The main characters are… I have no idea. I can’t name a single one. There’s a queen and her I recognize because she is WoW-hot and then some dudes with multi-syllable names that go in and out of my head like the wind. Our goal is to awaken some stones which I think then awaken more dragons? I have no idea.

Screenshot from an in-game WoW cut scene showing my character and an NPC looking through the door at another NPC
Myself and a 6-limbed dragon watch a 4-limbed dragon doing something nefarious

There is very little challenge to the gameplay and I’ve never had to grind at all, or do side missions to keep my level up. I guess they’ve moved all the challenges to the dungeons, which I haven’t done. New gear is granted from doing quests. I at first struggled with trying to put together some kind of “build” because there are a lot of talents to pick from, but then someone pointed out there’s a built-in build system you can follow so I’ve been letting the game tell me what to pick. There are random buffs that you get just from being in the zone to make things even easier.

So essentially for the first, I dunno, 30 levels of Dragonflight, it kind of all felt like an elaborate game of solitaire. Something kind of mindless to do to kill time.

Then finally things started to change. Right around the time you (finally) get to the Dragon home city (and can finally access your banks and optionally leave the Dragon Island to go do other things if you wished) I started having to do a few quests in the same region, which meant I was fighting the same kinds of enemies more than once and learning which ones did what and how best to combat them. And I was getting a sense of place. It still was damned easy but at least it felt a little like exploration.

Then that whole questline seemed to stop and I was shunted over to a time travel questline which I understand is eventually used to go back and play through earlier expansions. But THAT was fun and interesting. There were some boss fights, the story was neat, we visited different times in WoW history and learned some lore about the world. This section was over all too fast. I did learn that Chromie the Gnome is actually a dragon. Apparently they’re everywhere hiding in plain sight.

So that brings you up to speed. I’ve probably played more in the past 2-3 days that I have in the rest of the month since I was finally getting interested in the world. I think I’m almost done with the Dragonflight campaign and it looks like I’ll need to make up some levels somewhere before I can move on to The War Within. Presumably I can go back and do side quests or move back to the mainland. Whatever I do I’ll pick a spot and focus on it because my nature is more completionist than fast-tracker and being fast-tracked through this content hasn’t felt super fun.

Really looking forward to getting to The War Within and finally feeling like there’s no rush and I can just work on what I want, when I want. Hoping to get there soon.

Fascinated by my return to WoW? You may enjoy other parts of this series:
The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 1
The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 2

Right Game, Wrong Platform: Borderlands

Posted on by Nimgimli

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about how I was done with Borderlands: Game of the Year edition (for now). I’d been in the mood for an over-the-top shooter and had Borderlands in my Steam library. As old as it is, and as new as my PC is, I figured it would run like a dream and I’d have some fun with it.

And I did have fun, but it never felt 100% comfortable. Even though I could run it at a high framerate, turning always felt a little jittery and long sessions would make me feel kind of queasy after a while. Additionally the UI felt overly fiddly and in some places, outright broken. I go over all this on the old post so I won’t drag it out too much today.

In response to that post my old buddy Dusty Monk told me that the games were designed from the ground up to be played via controller and suggested I try Borderlands 3 on the PS5. I thanked him and filed that away.

Fast forward to me watching Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and it putting me back in the mood for some wasteland-y shooting and looting. I could have gone to find the actual Mad Max game, which is excellent but which I’d played through already. Then I turned on the Xbox and they had a sale going. $30 for 6 Borderlands games: Borderlands Game of the Year, Borderlands 2, Borderlands the Pre-Sequel, Borderlands 3, and a couple of the Telltale “Tales of the Borderlands” games, plus a bunch of DLC. I figured at that price it was a steal so I snagged it.

Just for grins I installed Borderlands: Game of the Year edition first, assuming the experience would be similar to, or worse than, it had been on my $2000 PC. But boy was I ever wrong. The game plays beautifully on the Xbox Series X using a controller. It runs at 4K and is supposed to be 60 FPS though I can’t personally confirm that. It does feel super smooth though.

Granted this doesn’t solve other issues with the game, like the fact that all the zones kind of feel the same, but with it all running better that stuff seems to matter less. Or maybe I’m still in the honeymoon period. I got to level 24 on PC and am just at 10 on console.

Anyway. I just thought this was interesting and it just goes to show you, you never know for sure until you (or someone) tries these things. I guess it comes down to engine optimization or something. On PC I was playing at 1440P but Ultra-Widescreen and maybe that caused issues? I dunno. I mean clearly my PC is way more powerful than the Series X but in this particular case, PC was the wrong place for me to be playing. Which sounds crazy, right? Playing a shooter with controller on console is better than playing it on PC with mouse & keyboard.

Just proves anomalies do exist. And to be clear this IS an anomaly; before someone takes me to task I’m not trying to start a platform war or anything. Just in this one specific case the less capable machine actually runs the game better, and I thought that was worth sharing.

Screenshot taken through the scope of a sniper rifle showing the blood spatter after a head shot
Thanks to the Xbox controller’s share button I can turn a head shot into abstract art. Yes this is the blood spatter that resulted.

Fallout 76’s New Caravan System

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last Tuesday (9/17/24 for Readers From The Future) the defining feature of the Milepost Zero update finally launched: the caravan system. I’m going to be honest and admit I haven’t engaged with it heavily since it has been quite the work week and gaming time has been in short supply, but I did get it started and wanted to go over the basics and why I’m actually excited about a system that adds infinite escort quests to the system. I mean don’t we all hate escort quests? I usually do, but so far not here.

First let’s talk about the meta a little bit. The basic idea is you send out a “caravan” (which is a single brahmin, at least at the start — brahmin’s being the 2-headed cows in the Fallout world) and it follows a path while attracting a ton of enemies that you have to kill to keep the brahmin safe. The brahmin basically does it’s own thing but you can interact with it to hurry it along which makes it run for a bit. I’m not yet sure if there’s a downside to using that too often.

The brahmin has a health bar and if it dies, the caravan fails and you have to start over.

So thing 1: a while back the devs changed the Medic affix (we call them affixes now, right?) to be a straight up healing effect. It used to be (I think, I can’t remember for sure) that having a Medic weapon increased the effectiveness of stimpacks and other incoming heals. Don’t shoot me if I’m wrong about that; I just remember that whatever it did, it was of no interest to me, the solo player. But speaking of shooting, what it now does is heal friendly players/NPCs. I have a legendary Medic’s shotgun that I held onto for no particular reason, but now I can use it to shoot my brahmin to heal it. It’s nice to have a use for the Medic’s affix.

Thing 2: When you start a caravan, it becomes a Public Event for that server that works like any other Public Event. Folks can teleport to you and help you protect your brahmin. That’s good both because more public events means more fun playing with others, but more importantly is that this Season the devs have added a post-Season Level 100 task where you get bonus Season XP when you complete 3 public events, and this task is repeatable (I’m told, I haven’t gotten to 100 yet). So this means folks wanting to grind the season pass past level 100 are going to want to do lots of Public Events and having a steady stream of them via the caravan system should help a lot with that.

So I kind of like how caravans pull together the Medic affix stuff and this new Season pass task. OK enough, let’s talk about the caravan system itself.

So the basic idea is you get involved with someone running an outpost that sits at the very south edge of the Shenandoah region that was added last June. You hire on as help and for every successful caravan you run you get paid in a new currency called “Supplies.” You can then spend Supplies to upgrade the outpost, hiring and upgrading workers who… I don’t know what they do yet, I only have one so far! I guess they make things more efficient/convenient? Eventually, as I understand it, you’ll take over the outpost and can decorate it and such; it becomes another base for you. From the very start it has some crafting stations and stuff so is a nice place to hang out anyway.

I’ve been a bit bored with Fallout 76 after maxing out my stats and getting good gear and putting together a build that could kind of take on almost anything aside from nuke-spawned world bosses. But the first time I ran a caravan, I died! It was awesome! The routes are somewhat dangerous just in the number of enemies, at least at first. I am still trying to suss out how many of the enemies spawn due to the caravan and how many are just there and are attracted to it (the point being the latter might not have respawned if you run a 2nd caravan immediately). It isn’t that any one of the baddies are particularly challenging, it’s just that there are a lot of them and you kind of have to get stuck right in if you want to keep the brahmin safe. No more leisurely picking baddies off one by one from a distance.

There’re also some Legendary enemies mixed in so you get some decent drops from doing them, which is always a plus and more so with the new Legendary Crafting system.

Caravans come in 3 sizes, small, medium and large. I’ve only done Small & Medium so far and honestly they didn’t feel that much different to me. Your first caravan of the day (?) is free if you go with small or medium. Subsequent caravans cost you caps to spawn, more caps for bigger caravans and the price increases with each subsequent run. While this might sound like a bad thing, Fallout 76 has a cap limit of 40,000 caps and I’m always near it, so spending a few hundred to a few thousand caps to run a caravan doesn’t seem like a big deal. I would guess the system is there to prevent folks from chain-running caravans for 48 hours straight, maxing out their outpost, and then complaining that there wasn’t enough content in the new system.

So overall and at first blush, I’m pretty happy with the new caravan system. We’ll see if it holds up as an entertaining way to spend time after I’ve dug into it more. It’s just really fun to have an open world event that brings in a variety of enemies (who, by the way, sometimes start fighting each other, allowing you just to hurry the brahmin along and out of range). For a filthy casual like me it appears that it’ll take me a while to get the outpost fully staffed and upgraded, and you know how I love progression systems!

Giving Up On Game Time Tracking

Posted on by Nimgimli

I guess it’s only been a few days, but I feel like I’ve been chasing my tail in circles trying to figure out a way to track the time I spend playing games in a way that Krikket and Naithan do. I feel like I’ve spent more time futzing around with quantifying my gaming than I have actually gaming.

Kevin Brill’s TempusGameIt is excellent if you’re primarily a PC gamer who focuses on Steam games, but it currently seems to have trouble when a game is being launched from an alternate service like Amazon Games or Xbox Game Pass. I’ve made Kevin aware of this and I’m sure he’ll sort it out but for now given that a lot of my PC games come from Game Pass it is missing a lot of my sessions. (Tempus is free and Kevin is building it in his spare time so bless him for giving us such a great system for Steam and other ‘traditional’ PC launcher games!)

I started looking for alternatives but either they were subscription based (and I don’t care enough to spend money every month to do this) or they were open source products that worked but had interfaces that only a tinkerer could love. ActivityWatch is a good example. It DOES work but I couldn’t find an easy/apparent way to tell it not to track when I was using a browser or discord or something, which meant I had to do some heavily filtering since I’m on this system for 8 hours a day for work. If I was in a tinkering mood I’m jump in and figure this out but I just want something that works.

I am still using Playnite which I LOVE as a launcher and a choice paralysis breaker. It does do tracking with an add-on that gives me a rough idea of what I’ve been playing most frequently, at least. The image at the top of this post is a Gantt chart showing what I’ve been playing. In the app I can roll over those boxes and see how long each session was but I can’t seem to find a way to total them up. [If this was a “live” view of the data you’d see most of the sessions are like 10 minutes long.. I’ve been kind of distracted by all of this. I boot a game, play for a few, then quit to see what data I got.]

And then there’s the question of console games, which I also play. Playnite at least shows I’ve played console games. The 3rd item down, Fallout 76, is the Xbox version. But it doesn’t show time played, and of course none of the PC-based general purpose time trackers will be able to see how long I spent on consoles, so I’m never going to have an accurate figure.

I don’t even know why I WANT this info! I just got it stuck in my craw that I wanted to put charts and graphs in my monthly recap because they look cool!! But at this point it’s all kind of becoming a drag. What I need is Raptr! Whatever happened to Raptr??! But really the chart up there is a good refresher of what I played (which apparently is a LOT of different stuff lately.. won’t fit all of that in the recap.)

Anyway… I’ve been trying to keep to writing at least 2 blog posts/week but I’ve been spending so much time on tracking software (and streaming software, but that’s a different post) that I have hardly been playing any games, so I have nothing else to talk about!!!

Playnite Game Launcher/Tracker

Posted on by Nimgimli

A while back I got it in my head to start tracking what games I’m playing in a more structured way. Part of this is maybe FOMO from reading posts where folks have nice neat charts of what they played and how much time they spent in each game. The other reason is to try to stop “losing” games. I’m not sure if I’m unique in this but sometimes I’ll be enjoying a game a lot but then get distracted and then get distracted some more and then even more distracted and I suddenly realize I haven’t played that great game in 3 months and now I forget what I was doing in it.

Anyway I went searching for a tool. The first thing I tried was Kevin Brill’s TempusGameit which worked really well for doing the time tracking. This is, as far as I am aware, a 1 person operation that Kevin works on in his free time and it is pretty incredible how well it works. My only slight gripe with it is that I THINK it keeps my machine awake if I don’t remember to shut it down. It’s not a big enough gripe that I’ve even mentioned this to Kevin though. Generally it’s a solid system if you just want to track time played.

However after using it for a while I realized I wanted more than just time tracking. I wanted a way to browse my library of games. I won’t claim I spent a lot of time looking because I remembered just such a product that I’d tried in the past, Playnite. Playnite is an open source video game library manager and supports a bunch of modules built by the community to add various functionalities.

The first, and scariest, thing you have to do when getting Playnite up and running is sign into your various gaming service accounts using it. I almost bounced off it right there but after doing some minor research it seemed like it was a ‘big enough’ product that if there were security issues around this people would’ve made a stink about it. Plus the fact that I have 2FA on everything helps, too. Playnite says it doesn’t store anything on a server anywhere. You don’t create an account on the Playnite site or anything like that.

Once you have logged into your accounts you run an update on your library and Playnite goes out to Steam, Epic, Amazon, Xbox, PSN (some of these require installing additional modules) etc etc and pulls in a list of all the games you own, then it pulls in meta data for them including cover art and so forth. You can even install extensions that will launch games for Geforce Now or Microsoft’s XCloud. Playnite also pulls in existing playtime data. Here’re my overall statistics:

Statitics page from Playnite
That Total Play Time stat of 12,080 hours is rather sobering…

There is one big drawback to using Playnite and that is you need to launch your games from Playnite in order for it to track them (this is mostly important for games that I don’t play through one of the big gaming services — Guild Wars 2 for example — since these games don’t have playtime data coming in via a 3rd party service). I quickly stopped seeing this as a drawback once I embraced Playnite as a universal launcher for all my games, but it is still worth noting.

There’s a ton of features here and a ton of plugins to add even more and I’m still learning about the system, but before I finish up I wanted to share one tool I use a lot, and that is “Pick a Random Game.” When the choice paralysis hits I use this to decide what to play. It uses whatever current library filters are in place, which for me is usually “Installed Games” and it picks a game from that list. Most people are probably adult enough to choose what they want to play for themselves, but I often am not!! I use the Random Game feature frequently. 🙂

So, yeah, so far I’ve been pretty happy with Playnite, though I’m still trying to find a plugin that will give me “# of hours played in a specific time period” which is really what I wanted in the first place. I’m sure it exists and I think an extension called Game Activity will do it if I figure out the right buttons to push and levers to pull, but I haven’t managed that yet. But I just find it ironic because TempusGameit does that right out of the box and that’s what I initially set out to discover! Maybe I should just run both!

A Few Thoughts on the New World: Aeternum Open Beta, Console Edition

Posted on by Nimgimli

This weekend there’s an open beta (details on getting into it in that link) running for New World: Aeternum, which is a kind of re-launch of New World. To be honest it’s all a little confusing to me but as best I can tell, owners of the PC version who have not purchased the expansion can access the early areas of Aeternum for free. Owners of New World and the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion (currently $30 on Steam) get the whole Aeternum kit & kaboodle for free. It sounds like your existing characters carry over but I may be mis-understanding that. On console, of course, it’s a new game with a full new game cost ($60) which honestly feels a bit steep to me, but then there’s no subscription or anything so maybe I’m just getting cheap in my old age. There is cross-play but not cross-progression, so if you decide to buy on console and PC you’ll have 2 separate accounts, which is unfortunate and odd since you will be playing with folks from other platforms.

Screenshot from New World Aeternum showing the questing interface
This is what quest dialog’s look like. Just to be clear that’s me facing the camera

I’ve played New World on PC, but not the expansion, and not for a long while and if I understand it things have changed quite a bit. So I decided to try out the Open Beta and chose to do it on Xbox.

I was, honestly, pleasantly surprised. The game played nicely with a controller; for me it was arguably more fun than when I used to use mouse and keyboard. When you create a character you pick an archetype which seems to just set your starting equipment. I picked one that uses a big-assed sword and a blunderbuss and that was quite an enjoyable combo. The intro is quite a bit different; a lot more cinematic and it feels more like an RPG than a straight-up MMO. But in the open beta at least you could definitely see that it was an MMO because the world was PACKED full of people to the point where doing quests was a challenge since mobs were dying as fast as they were spawning. And the chat was totally toxic; first order of business was to mute all the channels.

Screenshot from New World Aeternum open beta showing a crowd of characters
Apparently surviving that shipwreck wasn’t all that hard; I’m not exactly the sole survivor!

The basic game loop was what I remember: gather materials, craft a skinning knife, hunt boars, make food. Same first steps as it used to be. Then hunt zombies. Your character levels up but so do your weapon skills. All of this will be very familiar if you played the original game. I don’t know if the strong guild-based gameplay is still there, where a realm will hold territory and have to level up crafting stations and such. I’d need to research that since it was one of the reasons I quit playing as a primarily solo adventurer. But Amazon is billing this as a game you can play solo so maybe that stuff is gone?

Honestly I didn’t spend a huge amount of time playing. I installed the beta to re-assure myself this wasn’t a game I needed to pay attention to, but that backfired and I actually find myself having fun and thinking maybe I will pick it up, or if I go PC pick up the expansion. I’ll probably play again later in the weekend once the initial mob moves on so it isn’t quite so crowded. Heck maybe I should install the PC Open Beta while I’m at it and see how that feels. $30 for the expansion is a lot better than $60 for the whole game on Xbox or PS5!

But yeah, if you’re curious I’d say check out the beta, which is why I’m chucking this rough-draft of a blog post out into the world. I want it out asap so folks still have time to try it.

I DID play in the closed alpha on Xbox and that was pretty horrible (I was under NDA so didn’t say anything) but they’ve made a LOT of improvements since then, which is quite encouraging. And as I mentioned I found combat using the controller was a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to playing more at some point.