Last night, the day after posting a monthly recap in which I lamented the fact that I hadn’t finished any games in January, I “finished” Horizon Forbidden West.
But what does “finished” even mean with an open world game? With more linear games, you complete the story, maybe see a literal “The End” screen, the credits roll and then you are returned to the title screen. Not here and not with a lot of open world games. Instead you complete the last quest, the credits roll, and then you bounce back into the game with your character standing there with a “Now what?” expression on their face.
Generally speaking this is a good thing. Now you have all the toys and skills and the world becomes your playground. But for me at least, it makes putting the game aside a bit of a struggle. I was looking forward to finishing HFW because I have so many other games I want to play but now that I’m done, I’m finding it tough to say goodbye to Aloy and the world.
Specifically here is what I’ve completed:
Trophies
All in all I earned 58 of 80 trophies.
I missed 9 in the main game
I missed 10 in the DLC
I missed 3 in the New Game+ section (one of which is finish New Game+ at Ultra Hard difficulty…yeah no thanks)
The World
Finished the main quest of the main game
Finished the main quest of the DLC
Finished every Side Quest that I found
I did NOT uncover all of the world. There are still parts of the map covered in ‘fog’
Character Development
I’m well beyond the level cap
I’ve earned every skill I’m interested in, though there are some that could be upgraded a bit more
I have good gear, but not the best gear, and not all of it is upgraded fully (but it was up to the challenge of the final boss)
Activities
I did not complete the fighting rings
I did not complete the hunting grounds
I did not complete the machine races
I did not play the in-game board game, Machine Strike
I didn’t even ‘solve’ all the cauldrons
The first 3 of these Activities are all time based and I HATE time pressure so I just opted to ignore them. Machine Strike just didn’t appeal to me (I never find games inside other games to be too compelling) and the cauldrons, I just didn’t get around to doing.
Next Steps
So what’s next?
1) I could just not play anymore and be done for now
2) I could chase Trophies though several of them are based on the activities I didn’t do because I didn’t like them
3) I could explore the parts of the map I missed just to see what is there
4) I could start a New Game+
So which will I choose? I’m still not sure. Currently Aloy is back at her base, safe and warm. I always tend to take characters “home” when I’m done with an open world game. It’s weird, I know. I am pretty confident I am NOT up for New Game+ right now but the rest… well we’ll see. I have 112 hours on my current save and more in total since I re-started a couple of times. Seems like it should be enough. On the other hand it has been FOUR years since I earned a Platinum Trophy and doing so here seems plausible.
But…all those other games are waiting to be played.
Just not sure what I’ll do yet. Breaking up with an open world is hard to do. Am I the only one that has this problem?
[Image above is Seyka, not Aloy. Seyka is one of the main characters you meet in the Burning Shores DLC. I liked her a lot.]
And there goes January, drifting off into the past. I was REALLY hoping to be able to talk about the games I’d finished in this recap, but in the end I didn’t finish any. Once again. I’m maybe destined to play the same games forever! Well at least I’m having fun. I just need a couple of clones so I have time to play all the games I want to get to!
Playing
Horizon Forbidden West is one of the games I really thought I’d get finished. And to be fair I DID finish the main game, but now I’m working through the DLC. Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my all time favorite games, but I haven’t found Horizon Forbidden West quite as compelling. It took me quite a while to put my finger on why that is but I think it finally clicked. The newer game has a more complex combat system that rewards using the right kind of arrow on the right enemy part to cause elemental explosions. It also puts an emphasis on shooting off specific parts that you can then use to upgrade your gear. On paper this sounds great but I find myself just plinking away with regular arrows most of the time since I found the ‘right way’ to be too fiddly. Because of that battles tend to take a long time, which in turn slows down the pace of the game. I was at around 100 hours when I finished the main campaign and most of the side quests. How Long To Beat has that content taking an average of 60 hours. So yeah.
They clearly plan for a 3rd game and I kind of hope they walk back the complexity of the combat. I love shooting off parts of machines and stuff but my weapon wheel is so cluttered and the machines turn so quickly it is just rare that I get the right arrow drawn at a time I have a visual on the appropriate elemental weak point. Plus I’ve never been one to use traps and stuff. I just want to let fly with a ton of arrows! This is for sure a “me” issue more than an issue with the game itself. Anyway hopefully I’ll have the DLC wrapped up in February!
Borderlands Game of the Year Edition is another title I thought I might finish in January but it is still rolling on. My character is level 30 now and since that triggered an Achievement I thought it might be cap and I might be nearly done, but it seems not. It isn’t a game I play every day, either, so I’ll keep plodding along. I’m determined to finish…for some reason.
Over in the MMO world, I started the month playing both Warframe and Elder Scrolls Online, but drifted away from both of them for no reason other than distraction and wanting to finish some finish-able games.
Our hero looks out over the remains of a buried town
Atlas Fallen is a game I bounced off of, but then came back to. It has somehow become my after work palette cleanse. I never play it for long… 20-30 minutes/session. But I find the traversal systems really fun, between double jumping and air-dashing, and the snowboarding like sand-surfing mechanic. I find the world pretty compelling too. It’s post-apocalypse, but not of Earth as we know it. But there are ruins of HUGE ancient structures half-buried in the sand and the sense of scale is great. This is aided by an incredibly long rendering distance meaning you can climb up on some tall structure and see huge lumbering beasties way off in the distance. It’s pretty cool. The story and the characters I find less interesting and the combat was frustrating to me until I stopped being stubborn and turned down the difficulty. Now I can mostly button-mash my way through the combat, which is fine with me.
Early in January Wuthering Waves came to Playstation and I’d read so many positive posts about it from Bhagpuss at Inventory Full that I knew I wanted to try it. What I found is a game remarkably similar to Genshin Impact, which led me to firing up Genshin again. Meanwhile Dusty at I’m Still Playing was talking about Zenless Zone Zero so I wanted to give THAT another go, and as long as I was gacha crazy I fired up Honkai Star Rail, too. I knew there was no way I could play all these games but I figured I’d settle on just one. In the end I kind of just burned out on gacha and the daily tasks they all ask you to do. If I ever decide to focus on one, I’ll talk more about it.
Eternal Strands is the newest game in the recap; it just came out last Tuesday. It’s from Mike Laidlaw’s Yellow Brick Games. Laidlaw was Creative Director for Dragon Age over at Bioware back in the good old days of Bioware, so I was anxious to check this game out. It’s very early days but so far I’m enjoying it. You play a ‘weaver’ (a mage) who uses various elemental spells to fight and solve puzzles. (Though there is melee and bow combat as well.) It has an interesting cast of characters and a world that feels ripe for exploration. Part of the reason is that the game’s map is more of a sketch than a detailed map, and the first zone, at least, is pretty dense and complex. I found myself learning landmarks to help me find my way around, which is the kind of thing I enjoy. The compass is off by default, but you can toggle one on in the options, and there’s a “wisp” feature if you’re not the exploring type… you can follow the wisp to your next quest goal. But by ignoring those features and finding my way, I’m just having fun exploring so far. But again, very early days…at the time of this writing I just have a few hours into it.
Watching:
Nobody Wants This (Netflix) stars Kristen Bell so of course it was great. She plays a podcaster who, along with her sister, talks a lot about sex. She falls for a rabbi. His family is appalled because she is not Jewish and because of the tone of her podcast. Hilarity ensues, for the most part. It’s irreverent, sometimes heart-warming, often funny, often quite dirty. We really loved it.
Silo (Apple TV) – Season 2 had its lulls but overall it continues to intrigue us and we can’t wait for Season 3, which, along with a Season 4, is already greenlit. The show is based on a trilogy of books, I’m told. S1 & S2 covered book 1 and S2 and S3 will cover books 2 & 3 respectively. I hope things don’t feel too rushed. But overall, great show!
The Gentleman (Netflix) – When an army captain finds he has inherited his father’s estate and title, he learns there’s an underground marijuana farm that is helping to keep the estate afloat. His father had just kind of looked the other way but our new duke gets involved in an attempt to get the criminal element off the grounds. He pals up with the daughter of the drug kingpin who owns the farm. She gives off “criminal Emma Peel” vibes to me and I loved the character. Meanwhile the new duke’s brother, who is a hot mess, keeps causing trouble. I’ve never watched Breaking Bad but I’ve heard this described as “Breaking Bad meets Downton Abbey”. We enjoyed it, but since there’s a bunch of organized crime baddies running around, it can get pretty violent.
Reading:
A Knight of the Word and Angel Fire East – I’m continuing with my read-through of the Terry Brook’s “Pre-Shannara” series. So far they are just OK. I liked A Knight of the Word well enough to keep going, but it’s not like I can’t wait to get my work done so I can get back to reading. I’m just still curious about how he’s going to tie all of this into the Shannara series, because we’re still solidly in modern America urban-fantasy land. A Knight of the Word took place in Seattle at Halloween and Angel Fire East has us back in the main character’s mid-west small town around Christmas. Nest, the main character, is now 29 and spends a LOT of time putting on cold winter clothes and making cookies and hot chocolate for house guests, which isn’t really what I’m tuned in for. In all three of these books (book 1 was Running With the Demon) Brooks spends a little too much time showing off how well he knows these areas, constantly describing the buildings and roads our characters travel on even though they’re all pretty mundane. But again, I keep reading so there must be something here!
And that’s January in the bag. I don’t really do goals but I REALLY hope to be done with Horizon Forbidden West by the end of next month, and I’m looking forward to more Eternal Strands. Stay warm, everyone!
I’m a fan of Microsoft’s Rewards program. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a program where you can earn points for doing things like answering quizes, using Bing to search, or more interestingly to me, playing Xbox Game Pass games. A point is worth a tiny amount; I tend to wait until I have 95,000 points to redeem them for a $100 gift card, meaning a single point is worth about a tenth of a cent. Seems not worth the bother, right? But they do add up and about twice a year I’m able to cash in a $100 card, plus I find the gamification of the system kind of mindless fun.
In terms of Game Pass rewards, most recently there were Daily, Weekly and Monthly tasks to complete. The Daily tasks were always “Play a Game Pass Game” and “Earn an Achievement in a Game Pass Game.” The first was trivial (it popped as soon as you opened a Game Pass title), the second was variable depending on what you were playing. The Weekly tasks were things like “Play 3 different Game Pass games” and “Complete 3 Daily tasks.” The Monthly tasks were where the big rewards were and they were basically an accumulation of the Daily and Weeklies, with the highest one rewarding 1000 points for doing 8 Weekly tasks and X Daily tasks, where X was a number around 45. This meant that you HAD to earn an Achievement in a Game Pass game once a day for about half the days of the month.
What this led to, at least in OCD folks like me, was “hoarding” Achievements. If I was playing a Game Pass game and I earned an Achievement I’d IMMEDIATELY stop playing the game for the day so I didn’t unlock another Achievement which ‘wouldn’t count’ for anything. I appreciate and admit this was entirely a “me” issue but based on conversations in the Microsoft Rewards reddit, I wasn’t the only one who did this.
Today all that ends. All the details are on Xbox Wire but the gist of it is, rewards based on Achievements are gone; all tasks will be based on just playing games. Good news for me. That said, you now have to spend 15 minutes in a game for it to count, so no more hitting the title screen and quitting, though I guess you could sit at the title screen for 15 minutes and that would work. There also seems to be a big focus on ‘streaks’ of playing 5 days a week, each week. Lastly there is a monthly “Game Pass 4 Pack” and “Game Pass 8 Pack” task which rewards us for playing 4 or 8 different Game Pass games, respectively.
And then the big news is, there are now equivalent rewards for PC gamers. Same rules seem to apply only now you’ll be playing on PC rather than on console.
As of today I am seeing these tasks on the Xbox app on my phone:
Play a PC game -> 10 points
Weekly PC bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days
Play a game on console -> 10 points
Weekly console bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days
In the name of science I snuck off from work and played Borderlands Game of the Year edition on the Xbox for 20 minutes. This is NOT a Game Pass game but it counted for “Play a game on console” so it seems these do not have to be Game Pass titles. (Though I imagine in the case of PC it’ll have to be a game played via the Xbox app which for most of us means a Game Pass title.)
As a Game Pass Ultimate member I also have:
Play a Game Pass Game -> 10 points
Game Pass Monthly 4-pack -> 50 points
Game Pass Monthly 8-pack -> 350 points
Then there are streak bonuses.
Days 1-4 -> no bonus
Day 5 -> +40 point
Day 6 -> +20 points
Day 7 -> +40 points
These last numbers increase as you maintain your streak from week to week.
OK now the caveat is, this is a brand new system and I haven’t actually tested any of it yet. I’ll update the post if I find I’ve made any mistakes or if I’ve missed anything.
I haven’t done the math but I’m guessing there are fewer points to earn over the old system since Microsoft continues to decrease Rewards points over time, but for me personally I am super happy to see the end of tasks based on earning achievements. But we’ll see how it goes!
The other day I was browsing YouTube and came upon this rather depressing video about the death of console exclusives from Eurogamer:
The gist of it is that AAA games are getting too expensive and anyway young people don’t care about consoles; they play games on mobile or their PC. “They” say that young people don’t even have TVs but instead watch everything on their laptops. Based on my own circle of social media folks that I follow, I’m not sure that is limited to young people. I think more and more people in general just skip the giant TV in the living room and instead use their computer monitor.
Even though the video is about the end of console exclusivity, it also goes into a predicted decline of AAA games in general, just because they’re getting so expensive to make and the economy we live in is all about making maximum $$ for shareholders & CEOs with minimum investment in the developers and artists who actually make games. We’ve seen so many job losses in the industry over the past few years. (According to Wikipedia, there were around 25,000 job cuts in the gaming industry between 2023 and 2024.)
I don’t actually do a lot of PC gaming so I’m unsure of how many AAA games come out on PC exclusively but I’m guessing the number is pretty small and would be limited to titles from Valve or maybe Epic, just because these companies are invested in a storefront that can help them recoup the costs. If I’m wrong about this please correct me but it seems like the giant AAA games are generally console oriented, at least initially. I also guess there is some wiggle room in what we mean when we say AAA, too.
Assuming any of this is correct I do wonder what the future of gaming will look like. I too am someone who enjoys big blockbuster games played on a 65″ 4K TV, and I’d hate to see this experience fade. But what can we, as game consumers, do about it?
Realistically, not much. But I guess we can try to pay more attention to “AA” games, which is a tier that seems to be vanishing but maybe there will be room for it to come back when the AAA monsters stop sucking up all the development money. The Indie space seems healthy at least in terms of numbers of games coming out, though we’ve seen a fair number of indie developers close shop too. In that case it feels more along the lines of “We made a game and it didn’t make us enough $$ for us to stay solvent” vs “Our shareholders need more return on their investment so we’re axing a bunch of people.” Mind you how an Indie game gathers eyeballs when platforms like Steam are adding 19,000 games a year, I just don’t know, but that feels like a different issue so we’ll set it aside for now.
Not really sure where I’m going with this post. To a large extent I just wanted to surface that video but since I watched it I’ve been rolling this stuff around in my brain trying to make sense of it. The gaming scene I love is changing/dying off, I guess. But then so am I. I kid that my backlog is big enough that it would probably last me to my end of days, but it is legitimately true I think, assuming I keep playing at the rate I play and that I have another 15 years or so to spend on this ball of mud (15 years from now I’ll be 80). But I do feel like future generations will be missing out on something kind of wonderful if these big budget games go away.
Header image: A screenshot of the night sky in Horizon Forbidden West, exactly the kind of AAA game that I LOVE to play on the biggest screen possible!
Yesterday the superb Scopique shared a 3rd party Mastodon app called Sengi. I’ve been testing it out and generally like it but for me personally the column widths were a bit narrow (320px) and there is no in-app way to customize this (yet at least).
Sengi comes in both a web-app and a stand-alone app version. There was nothing I could do to address the issue in the stand-alone app, short of recompiling it I guess. But that seemed like actual effort and the web app seems to work just as well as the stand-alone. I figured I could use Style Bot to fix things up, but the web app window is stripped down and doesn’t offer access to browser extensions.
This was pretty simple to work around. Open a regular browser tab and go to https://sengi.nicolas-constant.com/, then open Style Bot. I bumped the column width to 500px using these rules:
Once Style Bot is set for the domain, you can go back to using the cleaner web app and your new styles will be applied. Or if you want a standard browser window, just keep using that.
I was initially going to share this on Mastodon but it seemed a little long, ergo the blog post.
Since it’s the last recap of the year, I guess we need to look back on the highlights of my year in blogging:
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OK now that that’s done, we can go on with the regular recap. I really had no highlights to speak of and I am once again asking myself why I even bother with this blog given how infrequently I post to it. I keep promising myself I’ll write more but time these days feels so precious and I never have enough to do all the things I want to do. Since blogging doesn’t frequently make it to the top of the list I guess I need to accept that it isn’t that important to me. But, y’know, inertia. I’ve been writing it for over 20 years.
Bah, that’s not a very upbeat way to start the final recap of 2024! I’m also stalling because I took no notes this month and can’t really remember what I played. [dramatic pause while I try to remember] OK I think I got it, let’s go!
Playing
At the end of last month I’d finished playing My Time At Portia and I almost immediately rolled into My Time At Sandrock but didn’t stick with it very long, just because I was dealing with a bit of “My Time at…” fatigue. I definitely plan to go back to it at some point after giving the series a bit of a rest. My immediate thoughts were along the same lines of everything I’ve read about Sandrock: it is like Portia, only better.
December was also the month I got back into MMOs, plural. Talk about not having enough time, right? I finally got into World of Warcraft‘s “The War Within” just about the time my sub ran out. I thought about resubscribing but when I compared the $15/month cost to the 4 or 5 hours/month I was playing, it just seemed silly. I’d just left the Isle of Dorn, which I very much enjoyed. Maybe at some point I’ll re-sub and just play through the story content. My general issue with MMOs is they never end so I can never ‘finish’ them and move on to one of the hundreds of single player games I really want to play.
I also got back into The Elder Scrolls Online, not that I remember exactly how that happened at this point. I think it was a super sale on the last expansion and all the expansions before it. I brought my Playstation account up to date then got sucked into the Golden Pursuits event they were running. When I got the free mount (pictured at the top of this post) it made me wonder why I’d bothered. That thing is hideous!!! But the event did push me out of my comfort zone. I did a PUG dungeon and 5 rounds of PvP Battlegrounds, just to advance the Golden Pursuits. Both were the type of content I generally avoid like the plague but in the end, they both went well. The Dungeon was even, dare I say it? Fun! Anyway I’m still playing ESO, casually. I paid for a month of ESO+ but don’t expect to continue that; ESO is a game you can play without the subscription if you just want to dabble. [Technically you never have to pay but when I’m playing seriously I find I really miss the ESO+ perks.]
And Warframe, which I actually wrote a post about. I’m still having a lot of fun there. There are so many types of content hidden away (hidden to those looking at the game from the outside, I mean) in this game. The other day I was running hoverboard races and pulling off tricks and stuff. Who knew?
I realize this doesn’t look like much, but here Aloy is standing in front of 2 machines she had to defeat at the same time: a thunderjaw and a tremortusk. It was quite an intense fight!
Aside from MMOs I’ve been bouncing around various single player games, trying to finish something, somewhere, and completely failing. I REALLY want to finally finish Horizon Forbidden West and Death Stranding. I started Like a Dragon: Ishin and was having a great time but just drifted away. Oh and after watching the Borderlands movie I found myself back to playing Borderlands (the OG Borderlands). At least I finally tore myself free of being a slave to Fallout 76‘s Season Pass which kind of led to me finally stop playing.
I am noticing a bad pattern with me and Season Passes where I start to obsess over them which quickly leads to me playing a game not for fun but to try to advance the season pass. Doesn’t take long for that behavior to turn the game into just another daily chore to get through. This in turn leads to developing negative associations with a game that I initially was enjoying. Anyway I need to work on that aspect of my gaming personality. I don’t think ‘swearing off’ Season Passes completely is the answer; I need to find some kind of middle ground.
Back to making slow but steady progress in Borderlands 1
Watching
Again, didn’t take notes so…
Star Trek: The Lower Decks (Paramount+) final season was wonderful. I’m really going to miss this show but I expect I will re-watch it often over the coming years, as I do most Trek shows.
Silo (Apple TV+): We’re in the midst of Season 2 and man waiting a week for each new episode is killing me! We love this show! We went back and re-watched Season 1 which felt worth doing, just as a refresher and because we picked up some foreshadowing we missed the first time through. I’ve never read the books but Part Purple has, and we both enjoy it so make of that what you will.
Man on the Inside (Netflix): Ted Danson plays an elderly engineering professor who goes undercover in a retirement community even though he knows nothing about being a detective. I would like to say hilarity ensues, but it’s more like amusing warm feelings ensue. And some melancholy. It was a wonderful show, though also a bit frightening if you’re someone of my age!
Nobody Wants This (Netflix): Once we were done with Man on the Inside we headed over to another The Good Place alum, Kristen Bell and her new(ish) sitcom. We’re enjoying this one too but be warned it’s a bit on the raunchy side, but it has its share of romance too. We’re still in the middle of it but since it’s a sitcom I don’t anticipate any big wrenches being thrown into the works. Good fun so far.
Yellowstone (Peacock): I’m finally watching the 5th season of Yellowstone, mostly so I can cancel Peacock. I had Peacock for Premiere League Football but I rarely watch any more and I’m trying to cut some streaming costs here and there. If you haven’t seen Yellowstone somehow, the best way I can think to describe it is The Sopranos in Montana, only with more lawyers. I find it compelling even though almost every character is pretty awful.
Dr Stone (Crunchyroll): This has been my anime of choice this month. I liken this one to a survivalbox game in anime form. Something turned all humans to stone for 3700 years until one science geek ‘wakes up’ and figures out how to wake up others, while at the same time he tries to jumpstart technology using all his knowledge. It’s pretty fun so far (I’m still in Season 1).
Reading
A Christmas Carol gets read every year, and this year was no different.
Also finished Running With The Demon by Terry Brooks and rolled right into the sequel, A Knight of the Word. These are his “pre-Shannara” books and are basically urban fantasy. UF is not generally one of my favorite genres but this time out it is working for me.
And that’s about it for December. Next thing I’m looking forward to is Wuthering Waves coming to Playstation on Jan 2nd. I’ve heard so much good about this game that I’m really looking forward to playing!
Warframe is a game I’ve tried to get into a bunch of times over the years but I’ve always bounced off it. Recently they’ve added a “Warframe 1999” event/chapter/I’m not sure what it is. I was so curious about it that I fired up Warframe yet again, this time on PC so I could start fresh.
For whatever reason it feels different this time. It might be that it runs so well on the PC; I can play it at a steady 144 fps (except maybe during transitions or cut-scenes) so it feels smooth as butter. Or maybe it is just that I DGAF any more so I am open to running missions with a random group and if I’m not as good or as fast as the others I don’t really sweat it like I used to.
Anyway for whatever reason I’m enjoying the game this time out, at least in the early stages. Since the last time I played they’ve added a lot more narrative and actual human characters to the game which gives me a bit more to ‘hook onto’. When I was just a disembodied spirit jumping from frame to frame it was hard for me to get invested. I’m also discovering facets that I’d either forgotten or was unaware of, like the fact that you can decorate your ship (see header image where my ship is decked out for the holiday).
I’ve now come to the point where I need to build a new Warframe (I could of course just buy some Platinum and buy a ‘frame but that seems like cheating) and wow, the grind is real. Here’s where I am so far:
One of the first Quests (yes, there are quests now) has you go to the Cetus open world zone on Earth to help track down some info. When you finish that, you get the blueprint for Gara, a Warframe. But you can’t just build Gara, first you have to build her components. And you need blueprints for those components. You get those from doing bounties on Cetus. Simple enough; I did a bounty and got one of the component blueprints.
I headed to the Foundry in my ship to build that component and discovered that one of the materials for it is, yup, something you need to build. A sub-sub-component. You have to buy the blueprint for it from a vendor on Cetus. Back to the planet where I find the vendor and, nope, I can’t buy it because my faction standing isn’t high enough. I earn faction by doing bounties, so I go and do more bounties until I have enough faction points to rank up.
Next I go to the reputation dude and, yep I have enough points but I need materials to rank up and I don’t have them.
So now I have to either run missions on Cetus or just roam around and try to find the materials I need so I can rank up my faction on Earth so I can buy the blueprint so I can make the sub-sub-components (which might require materials I have to grind for) so I can make the sub-component for Gara (which also might require materials I have to grind for), and this is just one of 4 sub-components.
Yeah, you need to enjoy the grind to enjoy Warframe, I guess. The good news is I’m finding the gameplay to be super fun so I don’t mind, but I do think I’m going to play Warframe as a ‘side-game’ because if I just hard-core focus on getting all this stuff it’s quickly going to become a chore. But I don’t HAVE to build Gara right away and there’s a ton of other things to do and a bunch of Quests to get through before I get to Warframe 1999 (still not exactly sure what that even is) so I’m pretty content for now.
Also me being my weird-ass self I’m dabbling in it on PC, Xbox and Playstation and created a Clan that all 3 of my characters are in, so “we” are gonna see if we can build out our dojo together which requires, you guessed it, grinding for materials!!
Last night was the 10th annual The Game Awards show and in the run-up to it, social media [or more accurately, my view into social media] was full of people who are critical of the show. I haven’t checked in to see if anyone has changed their minds but it’s the Internet so I doubt it.
I have had my criticisms of the show over the years but I do always watch it. I’m one of those who isn’t really interested in the awards themselves but is more there for the trailers than anything.
This year, I don’t really have any criticisms. I thought it was well done. Having Statler and Waldorf, the cranky old guys from The Muppet Show who specialize in heckling, was weird but for me it worked. They were like the voice of the Internet, shooting insults at Keighley as he stood on stage looking uncomfortable. Jokes along the lines of (and I paraphrase) “Why are there empty seats? We all know that Keighley is always a sell-out” brought to mind cringey Doritos ad placements from years past. They also made joked about the Elden Ring DLC being up for game of the year awards (something that seemed to draw a lot of criticism on the socials) and just ranting about how the show is too danged long (3.5 hours).
I feel like Keighley allowing himself to be criticized like this is a sign of maturity. Another was his admission that they really struggle with how to handle the terrible state of the industry right now, with so many thousands of game creators being laid off in the last few years (going from memory I think the figure was 34,000 creators losing their jobs).
The answer to that last bit was the creation of a new award, I think it was The Game Changer, and giving it to Amir Satvat, a guy who loves gaming and decided to try to do something to help those who have lost their jobs. He created a free service to help folks find new positions in the industry. Heck why not just take a look at the segment:
There were some wet eyes in our house when we watched that segment.
Another new addition was having winners from last year come in to introduce awards from this year, which was a subtle but welcome change.
Other improvements, in my opinion, was what was removed from the show. While there were some celebrities, none of them were super cringey. In fact the most uncomfortable moment may have been when Harrison Ford came on-stage just because (remember he is 82) he seemed to have trouble reading the teleprompter. But hey he is Harrison Ford, we cut him some slack, right?
In general the show just didn’t seem to be trying too hard to be hip, y’know? There were no edgy “influencers” on stage. The whole show was hosted by Keighley and Sidney Goodman; both of whom of course have a lot of experience with hosting events like this.
As to the game trailers themselves, there was a pretty good mix of styles and genres, though to some extent what gets shown depends on what is getting made, which right now means a lot of grim-dark melee-based souls-likes.
So yeah overall I really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to next year. To heck with the haters!
Oh and maybe it’s because I have kind of a nerd crush on Laura Bailey, but this was one of my favorite segments:
November is gone already!? I have to say having US Thanksgiving fall so late in the month has really thrown me off. For the past couple of years we’ve had nearly a week between Thanksgiving and the end of the month, but that won’t happen again for a while. Anyway point is the end of the month caught me completely unprepared, AND I haven’t been taking any notes to speak of. Good thing I don’t have much to report.
Playing
My Time At Portia — I mentioned last month that I had started playing this on PS5 and this month I really leaned into it. Last time I checked I had 120 hours played on PS5. Just this weekend I got the Trophy for finishing the “main story” but the game just keeps rolling on with more story-quests. That said, I think I may be done for a few reasons. First is that this game is terribly optimized for console. On Playstation (and from what I’ve read, on Xbox) it’s just terribly laggy, particularly in combat. I mean the frame rate drops into probably single digits when you start fighting in a dungeon. For most of the game fighting is pretty limited so it wasn’t a big deal, but now there is some dungeon I’m supposed to work through which is all combat and that’s not something I’m looking forward to. Second is that My Time At Sandrock exists and everyone says it’s a better game so I just feel like if I want more “My Time At..” action I should move on to that.
Also I’m sort of out of new things. My workshop (that’s it at the top of the post) has fully upgraded buildings, a factory, a farm with automated irrigation and it’s been a long while since I got new plans to build. So now it all kind of feels repetitive. I could buy more land and there are still house upgrades I could get, but the house decorating is pretty bad. (For instance you can place a table but you can’t put anything on the table.) I never got into the romance aspects because ‘dates’ are not much fun and involve a lot of running around. Plus I had stuff to build!
And y’know, I have SO many other games waiting in the wings, including a replay of Dragon Age Inquisition I was toying with, before jumping into Veilguard. But that’s another 100 hour game so not sure I’m up for it.
Also it’s delightfully ironic that I bought a PS5 Pro and then spent the month playing a low-poly, poorly optimized PS4 game on it!
But really Portia is the only thing I spent much time on. I logged into World of Warcraft a few times then my sub ran out and it seemed silly to renew it given how rarely I play right now. I may circle back at some time. I never even got to The War Within after buying it!
Watching
Interview With The Vampire (Netflix) — We watched the movie, then the series. The movie was kind of bad in my opinion, but the series was actually pretty good. I’ve never read the books so can’t compare them but it all just felt darker to me.
Silo (Apple+) — With the new season here we decided to go back and re-watch S1 before jumping into the new stuff and I’m glad we did. There was a lot of texture to the show I’d kind of forgotten, plus it somewhat rewards a 2nd viewing because you catch foreshadowing details once you know where the story is going.
Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai (Crunchyroll) — Weird title, but a rather sweet anime. There is something called “Puberty Syndrome” impacting students where they feel so unseen that they start to vanish, among other strange things. The title comes from an early scene when protagonist Sakuta, the titular Rascal, notices an attractive young woman in a bunny suit cavorting around in a library. This is Mai, the other main character, and she is trying to get a reaction out of anyone. Turns out no one can see her other than Sakuta. Thus a friendship is born. From there the story goes all over the place as Sakuta and Mai become a couple and try to help out others with Puberty Syndrome.
Reading
Kahayatle by Elle Casey — This was in our Kindle library; I guess PartPurple bought it at some point. It’s kind of “Lord of the Flies” on a grand scale. A plague has killed off all the young children and adults, leaving the world nothing but teenagers, and you can imagine how well that goes. For reasons never made clear a bunch of them decide to become cannibals rather than scavenging for food or hunting animals. The protagonist is a young woman who solves all her problems by beating the shit out of people, after which they become her friends for some reason. I started reading this before Halloween and thought it was poorly written but it suited the season. That said it has over 4 stars at Goodreads so maybe I’m just a grump.
Warpaint by Elle Casey — The next book in the same series as Kayayatle. Now the protagonist is living in the Everglades with some Native American kids, bludgeoning her way to leadership. When I realized there were 4 books in this series and it just felt like the same thing happening over and over, I bailed on it. Maybe I’ll come back to it next year in Spooky Season but for now, this is a Did Not Finish title.
Running With The Demon by Terry Brooks — I learned recently that Brooks has written something like 30 books in the Shannara series; I had no idea. Then I saw that this was the first one chronologically and it is urban fantasy that takes place in our world. I was fascinated by that. I assume, but do not know for sure (don’t spoil me!) that the world of Shannara is actually some far future earth. Or maybe there’s a portal or some kind of inter-dimensional thing going on? Who knows? But I mean to find out!
So far this is about a small town in the midwest where a demon, in the guise of a human, is sowing discontent while a young girl who can see magical creatures, both good and evil, tries to stop him. I don’t want to go too far into it because I don’t want to spoil things too much, but there’ve been some fun twists and turns and the writing is generally pretty good. I’m enjoying this one so far but 30 books is a daunting task to read. I can’t imagine having written that many. The first Shannara book was published in 1977 so I guess it HAS taken him almost 50 years. Terry Brooks is 80 now but apparently still writing!
And that’s November, such that it was. Overall it was a mixed month. Early on we were still dealing with COVID fatigue and work was an absolute horror show. But there was feasting the Thanksgiving, the weather finally turned cool and dry, I got a new console and I did a LOT of gaming, even if it was mostly just one game. And I’m starting December with a week off, so that’s nice! Maybe I’ll manage to write a blog post or two this month, you never know!
It wasn’t the most fiscally responsible thing I’ve ever done, but I wound up getting a Playstation 5 Pro despite its hefty price tag ($700US) and Sony’s cheap decision to not include a vertical stand, which cost me another $30 or something. It arrived late yesterday and I honestly haven’t had a lot of time with it but I just wanted to capture a few immediate reactions to it.
First the unboxing! It was packaged poorly, to be honest. The console itself was in there securely but the cables and the controller that comes with it were not and could rattle around in the box (though in a section separated from the console so they couldn’t damage it). This hasn’t seemed to harm anything but it wasn’t a confidence builder. You pick up an item this expensive and you hear parts moving around inside the box and you think “Uh oh.”
The console itself is smaller and lighter than I expected it to be. The power button is labeled now! No more groping my console looking for its “On” button. 🙂 The lights are lower down (when the unit is standing on end) which I find a little less distracting. The cover panels come off MUCH more easily than on the OG PS5.
Set up was a cinch. I turned off the OG PS5, unplugged the cables. Plugged them into the PS5 Pro and turned it on. As expected there was a software update and while that ran I opened the OG and took out the expansion SSD I’d installed. Once the Pro was done updating itself, I shut it down, opened the panel and installed the expansion SSD and plugged in the external drive that I store PS4 games on. Turned it back on and it did a “Rebuilding Database” sweep and then the games on my expansion SSD and PS4 games on the external drive were all ready to play. You CAN transfer data between two PS5’s but I decided I’d rather just re-download the stuff on the internal storage since I had a lot of junk on my old unit.
So what about the games!? Well the first game I booted was… erm, “My Time At Portia” which is a PS4 title not known for its fancy graphics. What can I say, I’m hooked on this silly game! The PS5 Pro has a toggleable option to “Enhance” PS4 games so of course I turned that on. It seems to just smooth things out for the most part. It was most noticeable in the UI and on screen text which was cleaner and sharper than I was used to. It also seemed to improve background images, like mountains in the distance. Actual character models and such didn’t seem to be impacted. I was pleased but not floored by the changes, but that’s just 1 PS4 game tested.
Then I tried Horizon Forbidden West and OH MY GOD what a difference the PS5 Pro makes. Most games these days (this is for you PC gamers out there not familiar with console-land) have two graphics options, a high fidelity 30 FPS mode and a lower fidelity 60 FPS Performance mode. I virtually always go with Performance Mode because I find 60 FPS gaming is both more responsive and more comfortable. Back in the 30 (or lower) FPS days I had some issues with motion/simulator sickness playing certain games, but that has gone away since I’ve been sticking to 60 FPS.
Anyway, with HFW you basically get (at least) the graphics quality of the OG PS5’s Fidelity mode, only at 60 FPS. It looks so much better. The lighting seems really beefed up too. It’s like a completely different game. There IS also a PS5 Pro Fidelity mode (that runs at 30 FPS) and I will have to at least sample that at some point. I can’t imagine how much better the game can look!
So that’s a pretty small sample size but the weekend is almost here! I’ll be testing a LOT of games this weekend!
Overall though, I’m happy so far. Honestly happier than I feared I would be. I kept reading reviews that were like “If you sit really close to your TV, this is the console for you. Otherwise you won’t see any difference.” I sit a normal distance from the TV (55″ TV, maybe 8-10 feet from it depending on if I’m leaning forward or lounging back?) and these reviewers are on crack. Maybe comparing like for like it seems that way. Like taking the Best Graphics mode on the PS5 and comparing it to Best Graphics on the PS5 Pro? Maybe? But being able to get the really good graphics at 60 FPS is a HUGE difference, and that is exactly why I bought the thing.
While watching a preview on Digital Foundry one of the guys said something like “If you’re a person who is always agonizing over whether to play at 60FPS with lower graphics, or getting the best graphics but dealing with 30 FPS then this is the console for you.” and that is exactly who I am and it was this one line that sold me on the Pro. I always wind up at 60 FPS after first sampling the pretty 30FPS and then I’m kind of disappointed at the 60 FPS image quality. Now I can have both.
Couple elephants in the room. The PS5 Pro does not come with a disk drive. For me personally this doesn’t matter but I know it matters a lot to many people. You can get an add-on drive but it’s like $80 more or something which is a fairly significant bump to an already very high price. Second, over on reddit there’s some folks complaining about coil whine. I haven’t noticed this but at 64 years old my hearing isn’t the best anyway, particularly when it comes to high pitched sounds like coil whine. So that might be something to watch develop. It could be a real issue or it could be an Internet molehill being turned into a mountain.
And all that said, I’m not here to sell anyone on a $700 console, because the price is pretty danged high. Though if you were shopping for your first PS5, I’d say the jump from the $500 OG to the $700 PS5 Pro is probably worth it. On top of the better performance you get a 2nd TB of storage (which would otherwise cost you $100 or so) and a smaller, nicer looking console. But if you’re a casual PS5 owner then you can almost certainly find a much better use for $700. I’m just an old man who sometimes over-indulges in retail therapy.