A Noob in WoW

Posted on by Nimgimli

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!

Posted on by Nimgimli

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”

Guild Wars 2: My First World Boss!

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OK I’m pretty sure the title is a lie. It’s more than likely that WAY back at launch I took part in a world boss battle, but I have no recollection of doing so. Also, this is kind of a thrown together lazy Sunday post, so apologies for that.

The other morning I was in-game, doing hearts and working on “My Story” when a call went out that a World Boss group was forming for an event that took place in an hour. AN HOUR? I ignored it because that was forever away. But I was still playing when the call went out that it was happening in 15 minutes so I started move towards the “Commander” making the call.

You can join a Squad just by clicking on a Commander (which is another player who… I dunno how they become a Commander, but it’s presumably an experienced player). So I joined their squad. No idea how many players can join a squad but it seemed, y’know, raid-sized.

Staying safely back from the world boss
I’m just taking it all in…

I was a total fish out of water. Another player helpfully suggested I use a ranged weapon (I’m playing a Warrior) but I didn’t have one, so I hung back and mostly helped to res fallen fighters and to clear out the riff raff mobs on the perimeter.

Want to know what world boss it was? I have no idea! Want to know what zone it was in? I don’t even know that. I was just in my own little world when the call went out. I never really know where I am in Guild Wars 2, just always working my way towards that green asterisk thingie that indicates the next step in your story quest. I have find that going from one to the next on foot rather than teleport, and doing hearts and stuff along the way, has kept me pretty closed to leveled up enough to just keep rolling along, but I pay NO attention to where I am.

Oh wait, I took screenshots! It was Tequatl the Sunless!

Screenshot showing a sea of people fighting the boss
Look at them all! We’re a horde! {click to embiggen]

I’m not sure I did any damage to the actual boss. At the end was a chest that looked like a trophy and I couldn’t seem to interact with it (image at the top of the post is of the chest, quite elaborate, no?), but what made the whole thing fun was seeing so many more advanced players in all their shiny armor and fancy mounts and stuff. It was a real spectacle and very aspirational. I can’t wait to keep moving through the game, learning new stuff, exploring new areas… I’m pretty jazzed about Guild Wars 2 now!

More crowd shots from the world boss fight. I have no idea what is happening
Like I have NO CLUE what is going on, but I’m having fun!

The Worst Game I’ve Played in Recent History

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I’m always trying to earn Microsoft Rewards points because they are how I pay for Xbox Game Pass. One of the ways to do that is to earn an Achievement from an Xbox Game Pass title every day. A lot of the time I do this by using a guide for some game I’m not otherwise going to play (the YouTube channel Rewards Hunter is great for this) or I boot up a game that is leaving Game Pass soon just to get a couple of easy cheevos before said game leaves the service.

The other day I was looking for another game to check out. The “Leaving Soon” games have left for this month and the next round hasn’t been announced, and I wasn’t in the mood to follow a guide, so I looked at what I had installed, sorted the list by size (since my drives are almost full) and found Atomic Heart, a game that I had installed at some point. Figured I’d grab some cheevos then uninstall it.

Good lord is this ever a terrible game. The premise is that Russia won WW II and advanced technologically way faster than it did in real life. So now they have floating cities and a robotic work force and your goal is… well I have no idea what your goal really is.

You play P-3, who despite the name is human. He has got to be one of the most obnoxious and unlikeable characters I can ever remember playing as. He just constantly talks shit to everyone he comes in proximity to. I immediately hated this character and kind of hoped he’d get killed and then you would play as the REAL main character. No such luck, I guess.

The game starts at a glacial pace. I’m assuming someone was inspired by Half Life 2. First you are riding a boat, a passive passenger. Then you get out and run along the canal you were traveling down. Just running from point A t B. You follow way points. Then you get on an elevator and ride that down into some subterranean area, and that takes like, Mass Effect amounts of time. When you get down there, some hyper sexualized robot gives you a key. Just hands it to you. Then you have to ride THE SAME ELEVATOR BACK UP and it takes just as long. The key starts a car which you might THINK you’re going to drive but nope. Instead a robot lifts it into the air and you sit there again while you slowly traverse the world while you get a tour-guide narration of things to look at. The image at the top of this post is from that ride. I’m being unkind because of course it isn’t all like that but it was like that for a while as we flew through clouds. Anyway all of this takes, not exaggerating as I noted the time, about 20 minutes. Then finally you can start to play.

Game play is OK I guess. You start with an axe and a shotgun, but few shells for the latter. You meet an old lady named Grannie Dina (?) who inexplicably speaks with a British accent (again, you are in Russia). She blasts something out of the sky with a rocket launcher while you watch, then it’s ANOTHER elevator ride. Finally you smash up robots for a few minutes and think “OK maybe the game is finally getting going” then you are introduced to the upgrade system which takes the form on an AI in a vending machine and this is when things just go horribly, awfully wrong.

The AI, which goes by Nora and has a female voice, is just awful. Every line she speaks has some kind of sexual innuendo about as subtle as a sledgehammer blow. I took some screenshots so I could get some of these quotes completely accurate (I was upgrading a weapon while she was saying all of this):

“How titillating! Rebellious, dominant men really turn me on!”

“But I can do so much more! A quick romp with your axe is just a taste of things to come, you handsome beast!”

“Use this powerful weapon to split the skulls of your enemies and bring me gifts so we can get down and dirty. I’ll show you what real smut feels like!”

At some point she says something about how I should plunge my axe deep inside her, but I didn’t capture that. Meanwhile my character is talking about her being a ‘crazy bitch’ or something along those lines.

Screenshot of the Nora AI saying dirty things

While I was playing this @partpurple came in and just shook her head and said “Clearly this game was made for 12 year old boys.” I hoped the earth would open up and swallow me. Later she declared this to be the worst dialog she has ever heard, anywhere.

Finally I got free of Nora and her upgrades and moved on. Then I found a recording where some posh sounding man was complaining about the behavior of the robots (which, remember, are the labor force in this world), saying something along the lines of ‘The white ones are OK but the black ones really have an attitude’ and that they need to know their place. Those aren’t direct quotes because they were audio only, but that was the level of racism being conveyed.

It was at that point I quit and uninstalled the game. Maybe this was all a setup to make you hate the people (and AI’s) of the world. If so it worked, but it worked enough that I have no desire to be a part of this experience. I actually could’ve dealt with the pervy stuff (though probably would not have played when @partpurple was around) but the racist stuff was just too much. I actually spent some time on Google to see if anyone else had this reaction. It seems not, but I was reminded that the developers had to apologize for including racist caricatures from an old Soviet cartoon.

As well, it felt kind of ick playing a game that glorfied Russia, given the on-going war in Ukraine. I’ll give the devs the benefit of the doubt that the game was conceived and started before the war broke out.

Bottom line though, if for some reason you were thinking of playing this mostly forgotten title, I would suggest not doing so.

Being a Newb And A Veteran At The Same Time Is Weird

Posted on by Nimgimli

Remember when I said I was done posting about Fallout 76? I officially retract that!!

So as mentioned, I’ve started playing Fallout 76 on Steam. Since Bethesda doesn’t offer any kind of cross-play or cross-progression, that meant starting over. These days you can start at level 20, which I did, but really the first 50 levels of Fallout is newbie-ville. I hit 30 last night. I don’t really have a build, I’m constantly low on ammo, I have no mutations, and I haven’t even really picked a weapon type to focus on yet. I use whatever I happen to have ammo for. Taking down a non-trivial enemy can take 3 or 4 reloads of a weapon.

But I haven’t stopped my Xbox Fallout 76 character. There I have a build that is very solid. I have quality gear, a ton of mutations (including marsupial that lets you jump really high) and more ammo than I know what to do with. Only the toughest enemies take more than 1 full clip of my railway rifle and many things get 1-shotted, though the railway fires so fast I usually waste a couple of rounds. On Xbox I’m level 320 or somewhere around there.

Currently there’s a two week campaign running where at the top of every hour there is a Mothman event at Pleasant Valley (where the legend of the Mothman first arose, apparently). The bulk of this event is guarding 3 pyres from enraged cultists. On the Xbox I generally pick a pyre and defend it easily. In fact other players just kind of get in my way. I find the event rather boring really, as there is zero challenge to it. (But. y’know, LOOT!) After the pyres are defended you have to get up to a rooftop to commune with the Mothman, which I do via just jumping a couple of times thanks to the marsupial super jump.

So after doing that, I log off the Xbox and log onto Steam and an hour later the event happens again and I fast travel to it and OMG it is SO hard! I basically have to be carried. The enraged cultists can kill me pretty quick, half the time I run out of ammo, and when I don’t it takes me so long to kill 1 cultist that 2 or 3 others in the same wave will have done serious damage to the pyre. I absolutely need help. Heck I even struggle in the preliminary part of the event where you’re killing deer and regular cultists. Then when the pyres have been defended and it is time to get up on the roof? I have to follow a bunch of ramps and stairs to get there and often, since I’m always encumbered, I don’t get there in time to commune with Wise Mothman! So sad. At least I still get the “Event Completed” but I don’t get the Mothman’s buff.

Going from one experience pretty nearly directly to the other just feels so entirely weird. I realize in a lot of ways you’d have the same experience just playing an alt, but playing Fallout 76 on the console feels different from playing on the PC, too. Plus on console I use a controller and on PC mouse and keyboard. So even things like the muscle memory I have from Xbox don’t really translate to the Steam version. It’s like a different game, only it’s the same. LOL

Honestly I find being the struggling newbie on Steam is more fun. I think part of the reason I’ve somewhat drifted away from the Xbox version of the game is I just get bored. I have a ton of quests to do but the combat in them is so easy that they all start to feel like fetch quests. Only when someone drops a nuke and an end-game boss comes out to play do things get really interesting. It was a hoot being really powerful for a while, but eventually you start to miss that challenge, y’know?

At QuakeCon there was a Fallout 76 panel and they did mention that they are aware that there is not enough difficult content in the game and they heavily implied that more will be added, so I’m looking forward to that. Until then I’ll keep being the newbie on Steam, getting underfoot and in the way of the old pros who could probably solo the event without too much difficulty!

A Curious Little Fallout 76 Movement Bug

Posted on by Nimgimli

While I never signed up or declared my intention to take part in Blaugust, on August 1st I got some FOMO and wrote a post. Then another on the 2nd, and another after that and here we are half-way through the month and I’ve kept it up. But my batteries are running down, mostly because half my team at work is on leave or vacation just as the summer lull is ending and projects are starting to heat up. One team member comes back next Tuesday so I THINK if I can get through to then, I might make the full month, but this week has been tough. (Plus GamesCom is next week which should provide plenty of blog fodder.)

All of which is a preamble to a short little post about a curious bug I ran into in the PC/Steam version of Fallout 76. Yes, now I’m playing Fallout 76 on Steam…did I mention that here? First I was going to play it on GeForce Now but then I got hooked (again!) and decided to install it locally.

So I was having a great time of it for a while, then suddenly I lost the ability to move. I was playing with a controller and at first thought it was a controller bug. I would turn and look around a bit and then suddenly I’d start moving again. I figured that was my cue to get used to playing with mouse and keyboard. But the same thing happened even after I’d set the controller aside. It hadn’t happened when I was playing on GeForce Now, though. And I noticed it seemed to happen more when I was in a building than when I was outside. I had installed a mod that was supposed to improve wide-screen support, so I disabled that (honestly I didn’t notice much different anyway…but FO76 could really improve its wide screen support). That didn’t fix the bug. But through continued messing with it I discovered that it mostly happened when I looked down to loot a body, and looking up at the sky would often fix it.

Screenshot of the fallout76prefs.ini file
If you’re playing the Xbox Windows version of Fallout 76, look in Project76Prefs.ini instead

To keep a short post short, it turns out it was a framerate issue. When I looked down at the ground, or when I was inside an enclosed area, the framerate went so high the that game just seemed to freak out and couldn’t keep up or something. THAT was when I remembered that I’d followed YouTuber AngryTurtle’s advice to change a setting in the Fallout76Prefs.ini file. The specific setting was iPresentInterval=1 which we were told to set to iPresentInterval=0 to make the game run much better. Which in fact it does…it apparently turns off the FPS cap and the game’s built in VSYNC. But it maybe does TOO good a job?

The solution is either to just turn that back to 1, or to use the Nvidia control panel to cap the framerate. I did the latter, setting max framerate to 144 fps which is what my monitor runs at. I had a bit of screen tearing when I looked down and ran, so I also turned on Nvidia Vsync. That fixed the issue for me.

It was just such a weird bug that rather than annoy me, I found it kind of amusing and fascinating (OK I mostly felt that way AFTER I solved it). If any devs wander by I’d love to hear a theory as to why too high a framerate would make a game engine just sit down and cry like this!

Screenshot of my nvidia control panel settings for fallout76.exe