Author: Nimgimli

Why I Don’t (Usually) Watch Twitch Streams

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was kind of struggling to find ONE LAST topic for #naaagust earlier this week (I don’t always post things in the order I write them) when another round of Twitch drops came along and Tipa wrote a post about how odd the whole concept is. I commented there that I don’t often actively watch Twitch but I will open a stream and mute the tab just to get the drops. As I’m writing this I have the stream of an acquaintance from Mastodon in a muted tab. Not for drops but just to ‘help’ their channel. I think it helps?

But in case any streamers read this and are curious as to WHY I don’t watch Twitch, I figured I’d share in case it is helpful for them as a way to expand their audience. I mean I am not conceited enough to believe that I am some unique individual so if I think this way, there are probably others who think the same way.

I do want to stress, in the strongest terms possible, that I am NOT telling anyone what to do! I don’t know the business of streaming and if streaming is just a hobby for you then obviously you should do what brings you joy. I’m just sharing why I, personally, don’t often watch streams.

Why I Don’t Watch

First off, length. These streams tend to be LONG. I get that you’re probably supposed to dip in, stay a while, and go on about your business but I’m a bit OCD and am a start-to-finish person. It feels vaguely unsettling to leave something in progress. And I don’t really multitask, at least when there is sound involved. There’s no way I could watch a stream while I’m working because the streamer’s voice would break my concentration. When I’m not working, the 3 hours I could spend watching you stream is 3 hours I could spend playing a game myself which, sorry, I’d generally rather do! I don’t know how to ‘fix’ this, though. I assume you need to stream for a long time just because if you say you’re going to stream from 5pm to 6pm the chance of people working their schedules around that specific time slot is very slim.

I DO watch gaming content but it is generally on YouTube where it has been edited down to under 20 minutes and available on-demand. Anything longer than that takes a real commitment for me to start watching, and even then I probably won’t watch it all in one sitting. And just to be an even bigger pain in your behind, I won’t watch a VOD of your Twitch stream because when you’re talking to people in the chat I am only ‘hearing’ half the conversation, which I find annoying. I watch most content on a YouTube app on my TV so don’t ever read chat.

The second, and bigger, reason I don’t watch Twitch streams is spoilers. If you’re playing a game I want to play, I won’t watch because I want to discover what is in the game for myself. If you’re playing a game I don’t want to play, I’m PROBABLY not going to watch because I’m just not interested in that game.

Last is the little things, and these are SUPER subjective, but things that tend to make me turn off a stream: excessive shouting, and excessive cursing. And OF COURSE racism, misogyny and all that stuff but I think that goes without saying. But I personally am not a fan of that 14 year old boy energy that I encounter a lot on random streams. Fart jokes and things like that. A nice soothing voice helps, but I mean, your voice is your voice, right?

Why I Might Watch

So that’s kind of a dilemma, right? So what WILL I watch?

The few times I have gotten interested in watching a streamer it was some kind of ‘evergreen’ game that didn’t really have a set narrative. A good example, back when Mixer was a thing, was a guy who streamed Farming Simulator on a persistent, multiplayer farm. Farming Simulator is a game I’m kind of curious about but always get bored of playing, but since this person was working with others it was more interesting. Like one guy would be driving the machine that cuts the hay and another would be driving the truck that catches the hay bails and they’d have to stay coordinated (but often mayhem would ensue) They’d have daily chores to do like check on the apiaries or whatever. It was also a heavily modded version of the game so they had stuff to do that wasn’t in my version of Farming Simulator. There was also really no ‘start’ or ‘finish’ to the game so you could just drop in whenever and see what was going on. Maybe stay until the end of one set of chores or something.

So this channel was compelling because there was no set storyline to spoil, and since it was a group of players it was something I couldn’t do, in a game that I was actually interested in.

That, I guess, is my stream viewing sweet spot. Find a game that doesn’t have a narrative to be spoiled and play it in such a way that I can’t, or won’t, play myself. I’ve dabbled in watching e-sports a time or two as well. Match-based games. I don’t do PvP so I wouldn’t actually play these games, but watching skilled players can be interesting.

If I could find a group of likable friends that stream, it might be compelling. I tend to live my life with just 1 other person to talk to, so being exposed to a group of people chatting and having fun is intriguing to me. And probably not just to me. As evidence I point to Critical Role and generally the many D&D streams that are now popular. I mean MAYBE people watch for the role play but I suspect they watch just as much for the fun people are having together. (Note I don’t watch Critical Role because episodes are so danged long. One upon a time Deborah Ann Woll did a series called Relics & Rarities which was a role play series where each episode was an hour long, and that was something we loved.) I’d probably enjoy being a fly on the wall and watching you and a few friends have fun playing a game together. Probably a co-op game since there’s usually more friendly banter and less stress about winning or losing.

So in summary, maybe this is helpful or food for thought. Maybe it is just coming across as me being selfish and expecting the world to deliver exactly what I want it to! But I just wanted to give a glimpse into the mind of a non-viewer in case it is of any help to anyone. If anyone knows of streams that I might enjoy, giving all the above, please leave a comment!

The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 1

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If you asked me a few weeks ago if I was thinking of trying World of Warcraft again I would’ve told you a very firm “NOPE” but here I am.

Just to recap the journey up to now. First played WoW in the Friends & Family Beta when the only race you could play were the Undead. Or Forsaken? I can’t even remember the race name. The skeleton characters. Played at launch heavily up to the release of the Burning Crusades then quit. For a while I’d go back to try new expansions, and whichever one the Blood Elves were in was the last time I spent any amount of time at all playing.

At some point post-Cataclysm I tried again but, not knowing any better, I treated it like “Classic WoW” and just went to Northshire Abbey then Goldshire then Westfall just like I’d always done. I leveled so fast and gameplay was so easy I didn’t stay long. Maybe tried the same thing for Night Elves? Then I tried Classic but that was too far the other way, if you know what I mean. I’d done those first zones so often they just felt tedious and THAT leveling was too slow! All this stopped quite a few years ago. 3? 4? 5 maybe? A long while ago.

OK that brings us up to now, and if you’re playing WoW this will all be stuff you already know. I’m writing this more for friends who, like me, haven’t played in a long time.

I rolled a new character (because of course I did) and ran through the new starter zone called Exiles Reach. (You do have a choice of starting in your racial staring zone). I liked Exiles Reach because there was a nice group of characters from various races there which was a good reminder to me that this was “New WoW”. If doesn’t take too long to run through even doing everything (I think I did everything) and when you get out you’ll be about level 10 and you get ported to your race’s main city, in my case Stormwind. Good old Stormwind. It was kind of nice to learn I still knew my way around it without much trouble, aside from that new-fangled Harbor zone. When did Stormwind get a harbor?

Then I had a few choices. The game nudged me towards two, one of which was Dragonflight, the last expansion (this was before The War Within had launched) and the other was, I THINK, the ‘pre-patch’ zone that I’ve heard friends talking about and which didn’t look super interesting from what I’d seen. Seemed just a place to grind up levels, but I could be wrong and maybe that wasn’t even what choice #2 was. They don’t make it very clear (though once you decide on a ‘campaign’ they make it pretty hard to get lost). And if I didn’t want to do either of those I could’ve headed down to Elwynn Forest or something, but I knew I didn’t want to do that, at least not right away. There are also ways to go back and play earlier expansions but I think you need at least one high level character before you can access that system. I’m not sure how interested I am in that, anyway.

Quest panel from World of Warcraft
It’d be pretty hard to get lost in the campaign. If you forget to accept a quest the game will remind you, and while it is hard to see here, there’s an icon on the map showing exactly where you need to go

In the end I went with Dragonflight, a zone I’d never been to in a game that was both familiar and very alien. I feel like the narrative is much heavier than it used to be, which I’m enjoying. Not only do we get some cut scenes but also there are NPCs with conversation bubbles over their head. When you interact with these it kicks off a discussion between a few NPCs that you just eavesdrop on. I’m eating that stuff up.

There’s now a metric sh*t ton of stuff to collect and a lot of it is account-wide. I was over the moon when I checked the Mount collection and my Nightsaber mounts that my old main used to ride were in there. And you can ride immediately. [That’s Petra riding a Frostmane at the top of the post, though next to Cadet Sendrax both she and the cat look tiny!] Remember when you had to hit level 40 before you could even use a mount? There’s a ton of systems I know nothing about, but I could still take skinning so I can skin my kills and sell the leather, so that felt really familiar!

There’s now the Warband stuff where all your characters across all servers are part of an extended family. Aside from showing a group of them on the login screen I’m not sure what real impact that has. There is a shared bank vault for anyone in your Warband but it costs 1,000 gold which seemed crazy until I saw how fast gold accumulates in “new WoW”. So that’s something fun to work towards. I guess in the newer zones you can set things so that quests that you’ve already done on other characters are hidden which will be handy if I start running alts.

Toy Box interface from WOW
Like collecting things? There’s 48 pages worth of “Toy Box” items to collect.

Appearance item collection from WoW
And 42 pages of appearance items!

As for the actual minute-to-minute gameplay, that still feels like good old WoW to me. I’m playing a Paladin which I’ve played before. There’s now a specialization system (3 per class I guess) and you get skill points to spend as you level up. I honestly cannot recall if that was in vanilla WoW or not but it seems like another alt-friendly system. I THINK you can switch specializations at will, but I’m not sure.

I’m playing on a low-population server and noticed a lot of other characters had an * after their name. According to Google this means they’re from a different server. I’m not sure exactly how that works…did they choose to come play on Kirin Tor or does the game just magically move them to balance things out. Not sure. To be fair I’ve not interacted with anyone anyway. Even chat is quiet, to the point where I wondered if some channels defaulted to off but it didn’t seem that way. There’s a lot of odd things that don’t unlock until you get a few levels (like area looting unlocked at level 8 or something) so maybe the game is protecting me from “Barrens Chat” as we used to call it.

So yeah, having fun so far. Love learning about these dragon-people, which I didn’t know existed. New cultures with new lore is always fun. The old routine of grabbing 1 ‘big’ quest and then 2 or 3 ‘kill ten rats’ quests that happen in the same spot is both familiar and still enjoyable. Nothing like running back and handing in 3 or 4 quests all at the same time and watching the experience bar move! As I mentioned I’m really digging the heavier story telling.

So that’s where I’ll leave things for now but as I learn and experience more stuff I may be back with more WoW Journal Entries. While everyone else is talking about The War Within you can listen to me yammer on about Dragonflight!

Fascinated by my return to WoW? You may enjoy the rest of this series:
The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 2
The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 3

Guild Wars 2 Update for Late August, 2024

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The last time I talked about Guild Wars 2 I was in a bit of a slump after being my own worst enemy and basically turning the game into a chore to get through rather than a journey of pleasure. I took a few days more or less off which helped to clear my mental palate, and over the weekend jumped back in.

This time I went back to playing the way I favor which is, yes, to follow the “My Story” quests but to travel from one to the next on foot, allowing myself to be constantly distracted by events and vistas and whatever else pops up as I slowly uncover parts of the map. I really enjoy this style of play and I am not looking forward to having the whole map revealed, but I guess I have a ways to go before that is a problem.

Guild Wars 2 image showing my character's latest armor skins
Found an anniversary chest in my bank vault and got these cosmetic skins from it so Petra is no longer a pirate. Also note to self: Turn off my own name in the UI!
So far I had one fight that was really tough (one fight that I should have been able to do on my own, I mean…clearly there are PLENTY of group fights that kick my butt) and for that one I needed to sleep on the fight, think of new ideas (and the game gave me hints along those lines, I just wasn’t listening) and then try them. Doing that I beat the fight the next day and it was really satisfying. So more of that, please.

If I AM going to have a real issue with Guild Wars 2, it might be due to what many people see as the game’s strength: the horizontal progression aspect. Right now my character is level 80 but her gear is not. Some of it is. Some of it is lower level than that. Then there’s the question of tier quality. The game pushes you towards having Exotic gear in each slot and I’m not there yet. The top 3 gear tiers are Exotic, Ascended and then Legendary but everyone says Legendary offers quality of life improvements but not better stats. So level 80 Ascended gear has the best stats in the game. And I’m already being urged to equip level 80 Exotic, which is just 1 tier down.

Thing is, I actually like the gear grind and farming for better gear and making my character more powerful. I have a ways to go before I have all level 80 Ascended gear, unless I watch one of the many “How to gear up fast” videos and follow along. But I DON’T want to go the trading post and just buy gear that some other player has crafted or found; where’s the enjoyment in that? Getting your gear is half the fun of MMOs for me!

So I was kind of in a dilemma and then Stargrace shared a game-changing tip with me. (PixelOne had told me about this earlier but it went right over my head because stuff goes in one ear and out the other with me.) There’s an item in the shop called the World Boss Portal Device. It costs 400 Gems ($5 US assuming you buy them for cash) but OMG it is awesome. You use it and it tells you what world bosses are close to spawning and it will portal you to their location. And just to make it even greater, you can set it up so it notifies you in text chat 10 minutes before a boss spawns, too.

For guildless, friendless players like me, this is a game changer. I used it to do two boss fights in a row and my only “gripe” is then I had to spend a bunch of time sorting through all the loot that I got from doing them! Most of it was salvage or trading post fodder but I did get a couple of upgrades from it, and that was from just 2 bosses and maybe an hour of playing. So now I know that whenever I want to change things up and work on getting some good gear “drops”, I can use this device to jump in a zerg attack on a world boss. Super fun stuff! Oh and it just so happened one of the bosses was Tequatl again, and this time I was actually contributing thanks to having a rifle in my bag.

Guild Wars 2 screenshot showing my bags full after fighting world bosses
The only “downside” to chasing world bosses is inventory management!

I still worry a bit about what will keep me engaged once I DO get all my gear, but that’s really just borrowing trouble because it’s a long way off and I do still have a bevy of alts to level up and gear up. I feel like I’m happiest in Guild Wars 2 when I just do my thing and don’t worry about the future, though that can be tough for me. I’m a born worrier.

So yeah, still enjoying myself now that I stopped fixating on getting through the content as quickly and efficiently as possible. We’ll see how long I can balance Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft but honestly if I AM going to play 2 MMOs at once, this feels like a good pair since they scratch different itches. Guild Wars 2 with its more action-y combat and vast world that is about ‘go do whatever, whenever’ and WOW with its tab target combat and strong quest lines to follow along (and yes, it’s lovely gear treadmill).

I tell you what, there are worse problems than having TWO games you’re currently enjoying!

A Lazy Sunday Gamescom-Adjacent Post

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Here we are, the last Sunday of this month in which I completely arbitrarily decided to try to see if I could blog every day, and it certainly had nothing to do with any kind of event organized around BLogging in AUGUST. It’s hard to imagine: only 6 more posts to go, and I have 2 in the can in case of emergencies and then there’s my usual monthly recap (mostly redundant this month but I still plan to do one). So I only need three more ideas and I’ll have made it! Yay go me!

But anyway, once again I’m going to call out a few games I’ve seen while watching Gamescom and Gamescom-adjacent coverage (which I am STILL doing, by the way…there’s SO much. Currently watching the Future Games Show coverage which I think just ‘happened’ to come out during Gamescom though I’m not 100% sure). I don’t bother talking about games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle or Star Wars Outlaws since I figure we all know about those. I like to share somewhat lesser-known games that just caught my eye for some reason (or in some cases, no particular reason!)

Redacted is a rogue-lite with what appears to be a lot of permanent upgrades you can purchase between runs. I can’t really do TRUE rogue-likes where you completely start from scratch every run. I just don’t have the patience. I need something to make me feel like I’ve made some kind of progression each run. Redacted is by the same team that did The Callisto Project but has a VERY different aesthetic. Bright and colorful and low on the gore. The premise is that you’re a guard in a prison on Callisto and the prison is overrun by beasties. There’s one escape pod left and you have to get to it before one of the prisoners (of which only a few are left) do. So you’re fighting monsters, you’re fighting these prisoners, and if you find the corpse you left from your last run, you can fight that. It’ll be as powerful as you were last time you died, so there’s a lot of risk there, but if you beat it you get back an upgrade that you had on that run. Big risk. big reward. Anyway here’s the trailer

Staying in the world of rogue-lites is 33 Immortals. This isn’t a new announcement but I’m mentioning it because there’s a beta running on Game Pass this weekend and I’ve tried it. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say about it, but suffice to say that assuming it ships in good shape and isn’t full of bugs, I’ll be picking it up. The premise here is that you join 32 other players on a map chock-full of baddies. If you wander off on your own you’ll probably die, but herding 32 strangers is hard, right? And there are these mini-dungeon areas you’ll find that have even tougher enemies but again, going in alone is almost certain death so you have to kind of organically join a crowd and hope everyone goes in there. As with Redacted there are permanent upgrades you can purchase between runs so you’re always getting a little stronger. And once again, bright and colorful graphics. Here’s a 9 minute segment from the Xbox Gamescom coverage about the game:

Eternal Strands is not a rogue-lite! It’s fantasy game featuring mostly magical, physics-based combat, from what I can see. It’s from Yellow Brick Games, one member of whom is Mike Laidlaw who used to be with Bioware. I don’t actually know a lot about this one other than what is in the trailer, but I just got a good vibe from it. Maybe it’s because I followed Laidlaw back on ‘good’ Twitter so I feel that weird artificial connection to him that you get when you 1-way follow someone on social media. Ha!

Now if you know me, you know I love nautical themed games and I love pirates, even though, yeah I know REAL pirates weren’t, and are not, nice people. Just let me have this, OK? Rogue Waters is a pirating tactics game. It has both ship-to-ship and cutlass-to-cutlass combat, and just to be clear these are Saturday matinee pirates, get me, matey? It is not 100% clear how the ship-to-ship fights play out but once you’re on the enemy deck it appears to be pure tactics gameplay. Guess we’ll see when it comes out at the end of September.

Last up is Lost Skies which just caught my attention because grappling hooks and gliding. I love flying in games almost as much as I love captaining a pirate ship. This is another game I know almost nothing about but the very short trailer enchanted me, even if I can’t quite articulate why.

Oh, one last bonus game that doesn’t quite fit in the ‘you might not know about this one’ bucket, and that is Warhammer 40K Space Marines II. I’m sharing this just because I thought this was going to be another horde-mode co-op game like Vermintide but it is not. It’s got a proper single player campaign… two of them in fact. You CAN play these co-op but you don’t have to. And there’s PvP too if that is your thing. Here’s a 10 minute segment from the Xbox Gamescom show:

Man there’s a lot of games coming out, aren’t there? We all need more free hours in our days. We need a device that lets you step out of the time flow to a pocket dimension where you can play as much as you want, then step back into real time refreshed and ready for life’s annoying responsibilities. Someone invent that, please. I realize while you’re inventing it you probably won’t have any time for gaming, but y’know, just take one for the team, OK?

A Noob in WoW

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Well I did it. I subscribed to World of Warcraft for the first time in I don’t know how many years. And my first hour or so was just WEIRD.

First strange thing is, just a few weeks ago I started a new character using the “Free until level 20” system and I played him for maybe 10 minutes before thinking “Nope, this isn’t for me.” This time I once again started a new character and enjoyed it. What changed? I guess my mood, or maybe it was because that first character was an ugly human male and this time I made a more attractive human female. Maybe I really AM that shallow!

Although Krikket had kindly invited me to join her on her server, I ended up rolling on good old Kirin Tor which is an RP server. I take it that what server you are on doesn’t really matter these days and I doubt anyone still role-plays but JUST in case, I wanted to play on an RP server. Not that I RP much but back in ye olden days I used to enjoy watching role play while acting almost like an ‘extra’ in whatever drama was going down.

Then finally I started playing and there were a lot of things I’d forgotten. Little stuff like, to open your inventory you don’t hit I, you hit B, for Bags. When you loot a corpse I’m not seeing a “Take all” option but I figure it has to be in there somewhere; maybe I need to check the options or something. With stuff like this, I don’t know if things have changed or if back in the day I had keys rebound or mods to help. But it felt slightly awkward and I was happy to be playing a new character, who is in a zone I’ve never been in before which sorta helps my brain process changes better. If I was at the Northshire Abbey I’d be hella confused.

There’s a lot of other little things I don’t understand, like some characters have an * after their name. Some NPCs have 3 dots over there head. I THINK that means they’re waiting for you but I’m not sure. There’s now a Newcomer Chat channel and folks were actually being helpful in it! Stranger still, I had questions!

There’s now the Warband stuff that gathers all (??) of your characters under one umbrella. For me it’s a little odd since I’ve used the same name over and over on different servers so I had several characters with the same name appearing on my login screen. Finally figured that one out: the characters you have tagged as “Favorites” show up on that screen so I shuffled some low level alts up there for the screenshot at the top of this post.

I had a moment of panic when I couldn’t find my old “Main” character from Vanilla WoW, but then I remembered the “level smush” they did a few years back. I’d heard about it but never experienced it. Turns out that very handsome level 25 hunter named Meglivorn on the left in the screenshot up there is my vanilla WoW level 60 hunter. I have several Meglivorn characters which is why I didn’t put it together right away, then I noticed his Warg Companion and blank tabard and realized THAT was him. I’ll have to wake him up eventually.

[Vanilla WOW trivia: Back when I was in a guild Meg the Hunter would be who pulled the boss in several dungeons. Imagine if a DPS pulled today! But he’d pull the boss and kite him for as long and as far as possible while the rest of the group burned down any sub-bosses or other riff-raff, then they’d give me the word and I’d have Meg Feign Death to drop the aggro. The boss would then turn and walk back to his starting point where the rest of the party was all set to pound him.]

In for a penny, in for a pound. I signed up for a 3-month subscription just to try to incentivize myself to stick with it, AND I pre-ordered The War Within. So we’ll see how this goes. I only stopped playing last night because it was getting late, so that’s a good sign, I guess! As to the cost, it struck me that with virtually EVERYTHING going up in price these days, a WoW sub costs the same as it ever has, which makes it feel like more of a bargain than it used to. That 3-month sub cost me about the same as what we spend on a fast food dinner for 2 and a movie rental on a Saturday night, and it’s for 3 months. So not so bad, really. Maybe I’m just justifying… 🙂

Screenshot from the early moments of a new WoW character
The default positioning of UI elements on a widescreen seems a little inefficient since I have to look back and forth so much

Next step is to ask around to see what mods are hot these days because of course even if I could remember the UI mods I used to use, that doesn’t mean they are still supported. I also may need some tips on the best/most efficient way to play on a widescreen. I feel like some important data is now out of my central viewing area, if that makes sense (see screenshot). And I need to read up on what exactly this Warband stuff is for. I do know that some quests told me that another member of my warband had already completed it (presumably the other alt I’d rolled up a couple weeks back). And I think I’ll go through and delete some of these alts because I have a ridiculous number and many of them are VERY low level (like under 5). So there’s some tidying to be done.

And here is where I was going to share the “Warcraft Story” for one of my old mains, but none of them seem to be findable, probably because they haven’t been logged in for years and I’m not really ready to deal with logging them in yet since I know a cascade of random pop-ups will happen when I do. My new character, Petrarav (did you know WoW doesn’t allow spaces in names? Her name SHOULD be Petra Rav, which is the name of my Guild Wars 2 character, Petra being a character in both Destiny 2 and Horizon Forbidden West, and Rav being a shortened version of Ravach, a name I often use for male characters — particular those that lean toward barbarian or boisterous cultures.) doesn’t have a story yet either, presumably because she was just born.

So that’s my WoW story for now. With trying to play Guild Wars 2 and Diablo IV and World of Warcraft AND Fallout 76…well obviously either something has to give or I just won’t make any progress anywhere, but as I said the other day, I’m just feeling rather self-indulgent right now, and I’m gonna play what I want, when I want, at least while this PC gaming honeymoon period is on-going. I’m not in any guilds anywhere or anything so if I just vanish from some of these games, no one but me will notice.

WoW Now, Holy Cow!

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The best part about writing about World of Warcraft is coming up with silly post titles.

As I am sure you are aware, World of Warcraft has a new expansion, The War Within, that is in the midst of rolling out. Early access has started and full launch is, I believe, Monday. Normally a WoW expansion wouldn’t interest me at all. The last time I seriously played WoW was before the Burning Crusade expansion. Mind you I was big into what we now call vanilla WoW. I happened to be playing when I was laid off from a job at the start of one summer and decided to just chill out and look for more work in the autumn, and I spent that summer just LIVING in World Of Warcraft. Joined a guild, made friends, chatted with them constantly. The classic MMO experience. It was a really nice time. Then it was back to real life and full-time work and for whatever reason Burning Crusade didn’t hit me right so I left.

I’ve jumped back in many times since but it has never really stuck. And now it is time to jump back in again. And honestly it probably won’t stick but as long as I have fun for a while, does it really matter?

So why now? Two main reasons and I’m going to be honest. Mostly it is due to game developer, influencer and all-around great guy, Dusty Monk. If you don’t know Dusty, he’s one of the nicest people I’ve met online and I think you should subscribe to his relatively new YouTube vlog, I’m Still Playing. (He is just starting out with this project and having more subscribers will help get his channel pushed to more people via the YouTube algorithm, so even if you’re not normally a YT viewer subscribing would still help him out.) I’ve had the pleasure to know Dusty for a number of years and I know that he and I have similar tastes in games. If he likes something I probably will too. He is pretty psyched for The War Within and he’s been getting me psyched too. Here’s the post, from earlier this week, that pushed me over the top:

And if you read the comments you’ll see:

Me: Dammit Dusty, stop tempting me!
Dusty: Brutha I had you in mind when I made this video cause I know you’re like me! C’mon check it out!

I mean how can I resist that? I can’t! I just can’t!

I do tend to play MMOs solo and I do tend to drift away when I run out of content that is solo-able. In some games I can join in with other people to do un-organized group events and I enjoy those, but the idea of waiting around to Form A Group at this point in my life isn’t very appealing. I am just past the point where I can sit down and know I have 2-3 straight hours to play, and like Dusty mentions in that video, you don’t want to finally get in a group then say “Sorry, gotta go.” I am just not that kind of person.

And this solo-friendly aspect of The War Within isn’t just something that Dusty has imagined. At Gamescom, Tina Fong, Associate Art Director on The War Within, when talking about the new Delves feature, said “something that is a priority to us for delves is that it really caters to a group of our audience that historically has been a little underserved by the end game progression loop that we have..” and she goes on to talk about “overworld” players, as she calls us soloists, while Game Director Ion Hazzikostas spelled it out, saying they are “making sure there is a deep solo experience“. In addition to Delves there’s now something like Final Fantasy XIV‘s trust system where you can do at least the main quest dungeons in the expansion with a group of NPCs. No more waiting for a group to take your DPS character through a dungeon so you can continue with the story. Dusty does a great job of going over all the solo-friendly aspects of this new expansion in the video above.

And if you want to watch The War Within segment from the Gamescom 2024 Xbox show (where the Fong and Hazzikostas quotes come from), here it is all queued up for you.

And in addition to that, just on the off chance WoW does ‘stick’ this time (there’s probably a dozen or more “Back to WoW” posts on this blog from throughout the years… probably some are showing in Related Posts down below this post), the start of an expansion which in itself is the start of a new storyline seems like an excellent time to dive back in. It’ll presumably be 4 years (the story is supposed to stretch over 3 expansions and I’m assuming one per year) before that happens again.

So yup, I’m going to do it. Of course I’m still playing, or trying to play, Guild Wars 2 (between overtime at work, following Gamescom and writing a post every day I’ve had little time to actually play this week), and I doubt I can do justice to two MMOs at the same time, but y’know, I’m not getting any younger. I’m going to play what I feel like playing when I feel like playing it and stop agonizing over my choices. It’s just games, right? There’s like a 98% chance that by mid-September I’m playing something other than Guild Wars 2 OR World of Warcraft. That’s just me, chaotic good. Ok maybe chaotic neutral. 🙂

Gamescom 2024 Day 1, Xbox Version

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There is a LOT of Gamescom footage flowing into YouTube and I, dear reader, are burdened with the need to spend my days working, so I didn’t get time to watch much of it. I wound up picking the Xbox feed since I’m pretty pro-Xbox in general. From that 2.5 hours of footage I’ve plucked two very different games that caught my interest.

The first is kind of a cute skiing game called Lonely Mountain: Snow Riders. This team’s first (?) game was Lonely Mountain: Downhill and it was about riding a bike down a mountain. I played it and it was OK but it happened to come out somewhere around the time Descenders came out, which was also about riding a bike down a hill. Riding a bike down a hill is a bouncy frantic activity though and neither game really grabbed me. (Those are all Steam links since I know most of my readers are Steam users rather than Xbox users.)

But I always enjoy chill skiing games like Ubisoft’s Steep. Snow Riders didn’t get much more than a gameplay trailer with commentary but I kind of fell in love with it:

It just looks so mellow and relaxing, doesn’t it?

Switching gears in a pretty radical way, the other game that really caught my eye is Atomfall. (I think this might have been on Opening Night Live but until I saw a longer look at it, it didn’t make too much of an impression.) This is a kind of sci-fi/folk horror game that is trying to capture the vibe of British sci-fi from the 1950s and 1960 like Quatermass and early Doctor Who. In it, a region in northern England is quarantined after a nuclear power plant catches fire. Five years later the region is still quarantined and no one really knows why, but the folks living there are really having to scrape by. Who YOU are is a mystery that you’re trying to solve. You play in first person and the game gives you no clues as to who you might be. It seems a bit rpg, a bit action-adventure. Combat is a mix of melee and guns, though ammo is very rare. There’s a lot of scrounging for materials for crafting, but it seemed more like The Last of Us crafting (ie making molotov cocktails and other smaller items) than say Fallout crafting where you’re making entire guns and armor and so forth. In addition to combat there seems to be a significant amount of puzzling and mystery solving.

Anyway here’s the trailer:

And here’s yesterday’s Xbox Gamescom stream all queued up to the Atomfall segment, it’s about 20 minutes long:

That’s not all that looked interesting, of course, but these were both new to me and each caught my interest in a different way. There was also a lot of content about Diablo IV, Starfield and some new games as well. And while I admit I fast forwarded through it, they devoted a good chunk of time to new accessibility peripherals. Not a bad first day for Xbox, but like I said, there’s a lot of other content from the show to be found if search YouTube for Gamescom.

Not sure I’ll do this kind of post every night of Gamescom… I’m really starting to run low on spoons this week. But we’ll see; tomorrow Xbox is talking about Fallout 76 (and of course lots more).

Notes on Gamescom 2024 Opening Night Live

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When I was mentally listing blog post topics last week I thought for sure that Gamescom Opening Night Live would be easy blog fodder. I’d just embed a bunch of trailers with a minimum amount of text and be done with it. Then I watched and y’know, I don’t think I’m going to do that. First because honestly there weren’t that many trailers that got me super excited on their own, and second because anyone can just go to YouTube and find trailers themselves.

I did, against all odds, actually take notes while I was watching so I think I’m just going to transcribe those to share the things that caught my attention. (By the time I finished watching the show it was almost 10 PM and that has helped me decide to abbreviate things somewhat!) Assuming I can find it, I’ll end with a trailer for the one game I’m most excited about. Hint: It wasn’t even in the main show, it was in the pre-show!

So basically in no other order than “this is what order stuff came up in the show” here’s what I jotted down.

We Harvest Shadows is some kind of horror themed farming game being created by a single dev, who calls it an “anti-cozy” game. He said during the pandemic Animal Crossing was a great way to remain sane but then he wanted to make a game that kind of twisted that. There’s a demo on Steam that I intend to check out at some point. I am just intrigued by ‘anti-cozy’.

Path of Exile 2 hits Early Access on November 15th.

Dune Awakening is coming to PC in 2025. It looks like it’ll be a great game if you’re one of those people who has a guild-full of friends, but to me it looked far too group oriented to be of much interest for me to play. It might be the kind of game I’d watch streams of, though. Also I wonder how varied the biomes will be cuz, y’know, desert planet.

Genshin Impact is coming to Xbox on November 20th. Always glad to see games stop being console exclusives. Hoping it does well enough that Hoyoverse brings Honkai Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero to Xbox as well.

Bethesda has added a vehicle, the Rev-8, to Starfield as of last night. I haven’t had time to try it out yet. Also the expansion, Shattered Space, is due out on September 30th.

Secret Level is not a game, but an anthology series based on a bunch of games and coming from the folks who did Love, Death and Robots on Netflix. Secret Level hits Amazon Prime on December 10th and I’m really looking forward to it. Aww heck, I guess we can squeeze in a trailer for this.

Peter Molyneux is back. He’s older and who knows, maybe a little humbler? He’s working on a godgame called Masters of Albion that takes a bit of Black & White, a bit of Fable and a bit of Dungeon Keeper and mixes them together in a game where you build up your city by day and by night have to defend it against monsters. The day part seems to be all in ‘god mode’ but at night you can possess a fighter and go fight in 3rd person, or zoom out to smite enemies in god mode. We’ll see. He at least wasn’t promising that this will be the ultimate game of all time. Maybe with age comes wisdom.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launches on Xbox and PC on December 9th and Microsoft has announced that it’ll be coming to PS5 in spring 2025. If you haven’t taken your cynic pill yet today you might entertain the possibility that they were planning for it to be an Xbox exclusive then changed their minds (since MS is so pushing the “Play Anywhere” mantra) but since the PS5 version started late it’ll come out a little later. I just think a deliberate “timed exclusive” of just a few months doesn’t do anyone any good, so I’m going to choose to believe this is the team playing catch up after changing course to make the game non-exclusive. Call me naive if you will.

And yeah, those are my notes which isn’t a lot from 2.5 hours of show (30 minute pre-show, 2 hour main show). Not saying there weren’t a ton of games shown but so many of them I just felt like I did with Masters of Albion: we’ll see. I’ve mentioned before that I’m becoming a little less susceptible to hype in my old age. My gamertag used to be “Jaded” and I’m starting to think I should have kept it.

OK now for my personal Game of the Show. You who have stuck with me during the years of once-a-month recaps know I was obsessed with Snowrunner for a long time, but I always thought “This game would be so much better if you could choose to repair the roads that you’re going to be using over and over…it’s crazy knowing you’re going to have to make a dozen trips and just dealing with the huge mud holes and stuff every time. Let us lay down bridges or whatever wherever we like!”

Well RoadCraft, from the Saber Interactive who made Snowrunner looks like EXACTLY that game and I can not wait to play it! Here’s the trailer which is pretty much all I know about the game.

This of course is just the opening night of Gamescom so I’m sure we’ll get a lot more gaming news over the next few days, so maybe I’ll have another post about it later in the week. Oh and if you want to watch the whole show, it is of course available on YouTube!

My Own Worst Enemy

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This is going to be one of those posts that is of more interest to my future self than to my current audience, so unless you’re really interested in how my mind works and how I excel at self-sabotage, you might want to read something more interesting! Like the phone book. If phone books were still a thing.

Anyway, I’ve been REALLY enjoying Guild Wars 2 for the past month or so. I’d started a new character and had been leveling her up and doing the basic “My Story” questline, while learning how to play the game. It had been going really well and I’d been looking forward to that part of the day when I could sit down and play, and I NEVER felt like I had as much time to play as I wanted. Last night was no exception. I couldn’t wait to log in!

Then, like a light switch being thrown, everything changed. I was playing through the story quests and realized I was feeling bored and started feeling the itch to play something else. It was the eve of a new expansion launch when a lot of folks in my circles were back to being hyped about Guild Wars 2. So why was I suddenly not? So me being me, I turned my gaze inward and tried to figure out why.

First theory was just me being contrary. Everyone else liked GW2 so I was going to not like it. I discarded this theory pretty quickly because the hype around the expansion wasn’t at the kind of levels that would trigger that reaction, and I’ve more or less grown out of that mentality anyway. Y’know the “I liked them before they were popular, so now that they are popular I’ll go find something else to like” mindset. We invented that mindset in record stores in the late 60s and early 70s, I think.

Second theory was the lack of dopamine. I’d hit the level cap of 80. For a good while I was pretty sure this was the issue. I LOVE leveling characters and that rush when you get that level up DING! That part of the GW2 journey was over for me. But the more I thought about it, the less I thought this was what was bothering me, for two reasons. First is that I’ve been playing a LOT of Fallout 76 way, way after hitting the level cap of 50 and I really think FO76 has taught me to love the end game. Plus, as in FO76, you do keep earning experience in Guild Wars 2 after 80, it just isn’t used for levels any more. But I hadn’t really been filling the experience bar anyway so even if the level cap had been 90, nothing really would have been different.

So finally I came up with theory number three, and its the one I’m sticking with. I wasn’t pacing myself and the game wasn’t pacing me. In case you’ve never played, in vanilla Guild Wars 2 your story quests unlock based on your level. So you get the first part at level 10, the next part at level 20, and so on. Between those unlocks you have to go out and do random things to earn levels to get to where you unlock the next quest. That forces you to vary your gameplay. Once I hit 80 there was nothing forcing me to mix things up and I was just going from story quest to story quest and doing nothing else. I was determined to finish it and I felt like the ending was close, so I was going to focus 100% on these quests. And THAT was my mistake and what ‘broke’ the game for me.

It’s not that the story quests are bad or anything, but variety is what tends to keep me interested in things. I didn’t stop to go do crafting, or to go explore new regions. Prior to level 80 I was making it a point to walk from place to place just to see what adventures and events I’d come across. Now I was teleporting, as much as possible, to the next story quest marker as efficiently as possible. I was making a point of going AROUND events rather than jumping in! And THAT was why I was getting bored.

What I need to do is stop trying to rush the story and just mix things up and enjoy ALL that the game has to offer. I’m pretty sure if I do that, the fun will return. There’s a ton of things to do in this game and to focus on just one is frankly kind of silly. So yeah, I gotta mix things up, relax and enjoy the journey. And also figure out how to get better gear. I kind of thought that would be from doing the story but so far that hasn’t been the case. But that’s a whole other topic. One that I’ve now watched YouTube videos about!

Tonight’s gaming time will probably be occupied by watching a replay of Gamescom Opening Night since my silly job expects me to work and attend meetings while that show is live. So that might be a nice break, and tomorrow, I hope, I can return to Guild Wars 2 refreshed and with a new outlook. I’m going back to exploring and taking part in open world events and slowing down on the story quests.

See? Told you it was going to be a boring post!

You Don’t Have to Build Your Gaming PC

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As I’ve mentioned more than a couple times, a month ago I bought a gaming PC. I didn’t have a ton of cash to spend; my budget was $2000. I mean as a console gamer, $2000 sounds like a crazy amount, but I have friends who’ve spent close to twice that on a gaming PC.

I am loving it so far. I did not build it, and I didn’t even go to a ‘builder’ place. I bought an off the shelf system from CyberpowerPC and I bought it from Amazon. I did make sure to buy a system and a brand that I knew used standard parts rather than OEM stuff so that I’d be able to upgrade it without any issues. Specifically I followed the advice of PC Builder Jason, who is a bit over-the-top but seems to offer good advice.

I made a point of waiting over a month to talk about the PC so when someone inevitably comes along and says CyberPowerPC is crap, or that PC Builder Jason gives terrible advice, I can with confidence say “I love this system and I’ve had no issues with it.” It got delivered, I took it out of the box, plugged it in and off I went. No hassles at all *knock on wood*. (OK I have one tiny issue in that all the RGB lights in it are too bright and there’s no way to dim them that I can find, at least without cracking open the case and connecting the lights to the motherboard. As shipped there are just physical buttons on the case that let you toggle between modes and hues, but not brightness.)

But to get to the point of this post, I think in some circles there’s a bit of elitism in PC gaming, and I wonder how many console gamers don’t make the jump not because of money, but because they don’t know enough about PCs. They see posts on social media or the gaming sites about how you have to build your own PC to get what you want, or to get a good deal, or to get quality, or to prove that you are a Real Gamer, and building your own seems too intimidating. To be sure over on the console side of things there’s a totally different argument but it is about PS5 is better than Xbox is better than Switch is better than PS5. Console wars never die, but once you own a system no one is going to give you crap because you don’t have extra storage space or a $200 controller or whatever.

I used to build PCs. Heck once upon a time I built PCs for doctor’s offices for a medical electronics company; that was my job. This was WAY back, like 1990 or maybe even earlier. (We sold a heart monitor that hooked up to a PC and back then many doctor’s offices didn’t have a PC so they’d buy heart monitor and PC as a bundle.) So I know I can do it (or at least that I could do it then, and it was a lot harder back then) but I just don’t want to do it. And I get really anxious spending all that money and worrying that I’m going to break something or screw something and winding up with a $2000 door stop. I know intellectually that is very unlikely to happen, but it still stresses me out.

I admit part of my resistance to getting back into PC gaming was the whole “PC Master Race” mentality that you run into on reddit or game forums, and the whole vibe that anyone who didn’t build their own PC was an idiot. Consoles are easy and gaming is a leisure activity. I don’t want gaming to be a source of stress. I also hadn’t realized just how far pre-made systems have come. I was used to the days when getting a desktop gaming system meant buying a powerful office system, a better GPU and a more powerful power supply and doing a Day 1 upgrade. That was what was in my mind. If I’d known I could have a fast, quiet system that I could just take out of a box and plug in, I might have come back to PC gaming a lot sooner.

Anyway, on the off chance that anyone who is curious about getting into PC gaming reads this, ignore all the elitism in the PC gaming space. I am NOT saying you shouldn’t build your own system if that is what you want to do. I’m sure it is very rewarding to do so. But I’m saying if you are not interested in that aspect of being a PC gamer, don’t let it hold you back. You most certainly can have a fine time with a good system bought from a big box store. Then if you want to, you can learn at your own pace. Maybe do an upgrade or two and if you really WANT to, you can build your own system 5 or 10 years down the road, ideally before you have a pressing need so you can take your time to build thoughtfully. I have pulled a complete 180 from “I like console, PCs are too much of a hassle” to “I love my PC so much! (Though I still love my consoles. too!)

Note: Header image generated by Bing Image Creator using prompt “image of a pile of computer parts”