Month: December 2020

My Favorite Games of 2020

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When I reflect on the beginning of this year it feels like the distant past. I was playing through Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and that feels like ages ago now. When I take a look back at Goodreads there’s some books I could have sworn I read last year that I read in January and February. But in a lot of ways it was a completely different time right? No masks, working in the office, going out in public regularly and eating in restaurants are a thing of the past now.

But through it all there have been some amazing games that kept me sane this year, kept me in touch with friends, and kept my mind off things when I needed it. In no particular order here are my favorite games of this year.

GTFO

GTFO was my group game for a good portion of the year. We bought it back in April and played it once a week until around November. After 43 hours I can say its a good game but one that doesn’t respect the players time. You need at least 3 people but preferably 4 to complete the levels. And with no saved checkpoints, losing after spending 2 hours stealthily clearing the map feels really bad. But the challenge and the almost clears is what kept us coming back for so long. The level switch ups every few months helped to keep things fresh but we never did complete a rundown.

Phasmophobia

This one has become another staple of our Saturday nights. At first it was creepy, it was atmospheric, and it was so different from anything I’d ever played. The first time the ghost talked on the spirit box and the first time the EMF detector hit level five is something I’ll remember for a long time. After 35+ hours the game is no longer scary but it is fun to see how fast you can find the ghost. Finding different ways to harass the ghost, and scaring my friends by throwing balls down the stairs.

Warframe

The last big group game this year was Warframe. We all got really in to it over the summer. I hit a 75% off coupon and bought the largest platinum package with gave me way more platinum than I’ll probably ever need. But when a free game’s given you 200+ hours it really does deserve some money thrown at it. For me personally, Warframe is an all in or all out game for me. When I want to play it I’ll sink in the time but when I’m over it I fall off hard. Our biggest achievement this time around was taking down an Eidolon.

Trove

Much like Warframe I’m either all in on Trove or all out. I played it a ton over the summer when the Delves update came out. I fell off of it in August and didn’t pick it up again until November. Trove is one of those games that always feels like coming home. I’ve spent 4 years with friends and it’s always fun to dip in to. I’m glad to see it’s still getting updates and I hope they continue into next year

Runescape

If you told me in the beginning of the year that Runescape would be my most played game this year I wouldn’t have believed it. Mostly because I tried playing Runescape in January and bounced off of it hard. I still have the post in my drafts and sadly never got around to publishing it. But In August I was introduced to Runelite and everything changed. According to ManicTime I have a 174 hours this year alone and that’s over a period of 3 months and doesn’t include the time I spent on my laptop or my phone. Yes, I even played OSRS on my phone…what a time to be alive.

While Old School Runescape started with nostalgia it passed that early on when I completed the free to play content and branched out into the members content. I was happily chugging along until the Trailblazer League started. To be honest, I went way to hard on the league and burned myself out on the game. I may pick it back up in January but there are a few games I want to get through before I start that journey back up.

Sunday Stream Recap: Phasmawelpia

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The Sunday Stream Recap is a new weekly post chronicling our Saturday night streams over at WelpSquadTV. You can learn more about WelpSquadTV here. Catch us live every Saturday night at 7pm EST.

Unfortunately, our stream last night was plagued by technical issues. For starters, I couldn’t figure out how to get discord to keep my stream running while watching everyone else’s stream. It took me a bit to figure out I had to pop out the screen share window to get everything running. My wife was attending a virtual concert downstairs and I forgot bandwidth was a thing until she started telling me her stream kept buffering. So we had Greg stream instead. Greg didn’t have a scene for our multiple view discord set up so we quickly had to cobble one together for him. We didn’t end up starting the stream until about 8pm last night.

There were a few hiccups in the game as well. I crashed to my desktop at one point when trying to load into a map. Greg’s voice chat went completely out in game so we had to use discord chat for a good portion of the night. Since proximity chat is such a big aspect of the game this was pretty immersion breaking. And as usual, Josh, who plays in VR, was unable to talk to us in the lobby at various points of the night. But it’s early access and we’re playing the beta build so these things are expected.

We started the night with a Ridgeview Road House. I wanted to try a run without a thermometer to make things a bit more challenging and this was the perfect, small map to try it on. I thought it would lead to more tension and a longer gameplay session on the map with out finding the ghost’s room right away. While it did extend the playtime it didn’t add any tension. If anything, it added some frustration. At this point, we’re past the point of being scared of the game. It’s more fun to find the ghost, yell at it, and see what happens.

We took the EMFs as our ghost detecting equipment. At first we though it was in the kitchen as we got an EMF reading as soon as we walked in the house. We set everything up and tried to stir up some activity. 10 minutes went by and nothing, another 10 minutes went by, still nothing. So we started looking around again. We got an EMF 5 reading in the living room so we set everything up in there. We still couldn’t get any activity to fill out our journal. We ended up guessing a Shade because it hadn’t hunted us and we were correct but the experience as a whole wasn’t as fun.

There also seems to have been a change to how the video camera works. The video camera you can set up in a room to look for ghost orbs. If there’s a light on in the room or any of the adjacent rooms the image will be too washed out to see the orbs. However, it looks like there was a flashlight effect added to the camera itself which makes small and medium rooms almost too bright to see anything even with all the lights off.

One of my favorite parts of the night was towards the end when we were in one of the farmhouses. I died early on and was walking around the house as a ghost following everyone else. Now I assumed that as a dead player I couldn’t interact with anything, but I was wrong! I couldn’t pick up any tools plates, cups, and dishes seemed to be fair game. I seemed to only be able to pick up things sporadically and I couldn’t figure out what triggered it .I don’t know if this was intended but the items I held would only reappear once I threw them which lead to some hilarious moments. Then Josh, our man in VR, died and that’s when things got real fun. When he picked object up they floated around for everyone else to see. When a floating stuffed rabbit is chasing after you it’s terrifying…

Apparently, as a dead player you can also body block the ghost when it’s hunting. I’m sure this isn’t intended either. I was trying to get a good screen shot of the ghost on the stairs from the attic. I was expecting it to walk through me but it got stuck and couldn’t get past me. Thus I was the hero who saved our party from being picked up that hunt. I tried to do the same thing in a door way later but the ghost got past me.

You can find the full stream VOD from 12/12/2020 here.

Cyberpunk 2077: Quick Impressions

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I was on the fence about buying Cyberpunk 2077 after reading some initial reviews. It’s a buggy mess they said, it doesn’t run well, it doesn’t liv up to the hype. But Wednesday morning I found my pressing purchase on Steam. Honestly, I wanted to see the bugs before they got patched out…I’m weird like that sometimes

I wasn’t super hyped for this release, I kept myself in the dark for the most part. I was excited about a AAA cyberpunk setting but other than that I didn’t have a lot of expectations. In a lot of ways, this is the No Man’s Sky launch all over again. Except we don’t have Sean Murray spouting off vague tweets about whether or not there’s multiplayer. But just like No Man’s Sky, the internet is up in arms and I’m sitting over here, 6 hours in, having a grand old time.

I haven’t encountered a ton of bugs so far. The worst one has been getting locked into the scanner in the middle of the tutorial. I had to reload the game but wasn’t set too far back. This happened a second time out in the world and pressing Caps Lock seems to have fixed it. I also found one NPC T-Posing in the first few scenes of the game. Other than that, nothing game breaking, not even that immersion breaking for me.

As far as performance, It runs fine at High on my PC. I’m rocking a 1060 and while I don’t think I’m getting a constant 60fps I’m not noticing significant frame rate drops. I also don’t have a counter going, I won’t be able to get new hardware for a while so why torture myself? Ignorance is bliss sometimes.

A friend suggested turning Cascaded Shadows Range and Cascaded Shadows Resolution to medium to improve performance. After doing this it’s been a smoother experience so far. Also, turning off Film Grain will make everything look sharper. With it on everything looked a bit fuzzy to me.

I’ve been enjoying my time so far. Is it the greatest game ever made? Probably not, but it’s a solid game with a solid story and it’s pretty to look at. I don’t need much more than that!

Corruxian Lands in Trove

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I was a bit surprised yesterday when I saw the announcement that there was a new dragon in Trove. I don’t remember the last time one was added. Dragons are kind of a big deal, they provide a ton of mastery, a new mount, and a small but permanent stat boost to all classes on your account.

Corruxion can be found in the hub below the platform Luxion stands on when he’s in the hub…wait a minute…Corruxion….Luxion….oh come on Trove! Just like Luxion, Corruxion will arrive in the hub every 2 weeks which gives players a chance to peruse his shop which takes Chaos Cores instead of Dragon Coins. Hence the Corr part of his name…probably. There’s also a small quest you can accept from Peetza in the hub to deliver a, wait for it, pizza to Corruxion which will reward 1 Chaos Core on completion.

Players can purchase 10 Chaos Dragon Egg for 1 chaos core each. Fragments each time Corruxion arrives. Which makes this yet another time gate to our favorite time gate simulator. You’ll need 50 Chaos Dragon Egg Fragments to craft the dragon so at minimum we’re looking at 10 weeks here. In addition, Charl the Chaos Dragon, requires 25k flux, 75 Chaos Chests, and 300 Dragon coins to craft.

Among such dragons as Khadavros, the Waiting Oblivion, Rachnaphon, the Silent Spectator, and Thallasion, Shaper of the Currents, the name Charl the Chaos Dragon is a bit unaspiring. However, Charl does come with a 1% Crit hit boost, +50 light, and the standard +50 magic find. Any chance to get a bit more Crit Hit away from your gems is always welcome. It let’s you squeeze focus on squeezing a few more percent out of one of the damage stats for all you min/maxers out there.

Corruxion’s shop is also filled with empowered gem boxes, lustrous gem boxes, Double Experience Potions, and Bound bBrilliance. It’s a nice addition for those that have already crafted the mounts and costumes that require chaos cores and have nothing else to do with them.

I’m happy to see Trove has continued to get updates this year. We’ve gotten Delves, and updated Hub and he addition of a new dragon is a nice way to cap it all off. Hopefully, we’ll see continue to see more content added next year!

Back in World of Warcraft…Again.

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It’s that time again, the one where my feed is filled with WoW content. It’s that time where I say: Hey, that looks like fun let’s jump in! It’s that time where I fire up the Blizzard launcher, download many, many gigabytes, and get crackin’ on a new character in the free trial. That’s right, it’s expansion time! But you already knew that…probably.

I’ve tried a few times now to get into World of Warcraft. I’ve gotten to level 20 a few times in the free trial. I’ve even subscribed a few times only to have my interest wane a month later. This time was much the same until it wasn’t. See, I’ve known about the level squish that took place right before Shadowlands came out but I wasn’t in the right mindset to try it out. I guess there wasn’t enough hype for my easily swayed brain.

I pretty much forgot there was a new starting zone until it was offered after I created my Panderan Mage. I had to see what it was all about. I was pleasantly surprised to find it had a nice condensed story mixed with a bit of a tutorial. I was also surprised by the number of voice-overs and cutscenes. It helped me stay focused on the story throughout the zone while I went from quest to quest. Apparently, I forgot there was a screenshot button too because I have none from Exile’s Reach.

Now, the one thing that’s put me off to the game for years has been the sheer amount of content. I’ve said it before, 16 years worth of content is intimidating. While I’ve enjoyed my time in the previous starting zones I’ve always felt lost after leaving them. So I welcome the new leveling changes.

Sure, I was abruptly dropped off in Stormwind, told the king wanted to see me, was surrounded by characters I didn’t know, and whisked off on a ship to Kul Tiras in mere minutes after I finished up Exile’s Reach. But once I got there I could pick up on enough of the story to get my bearings. Overall, it feels like a better player experience for me so far. I can still go through all of that other content but I only have to go through one expansion to get to the current one. I foresee many characters being created to check out the stories from previous expansions.

At the moment, I’ve been content just questing through Kul Tiras and taking it all in. My mage is at level 32. I’m not too much in a hurry to hit 50 but so far the pacing is just right for me. I picked up Shadowlands to give my self a bit more of a reason to stick around this time. Was that a good decision? Maybe, I guess we’ll see where I am a month from now when it’s time to renew my sub.

December 2020 Goals

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November was filled with small stints in a lot of different games. In December I’m going to be focusing on two or three games this month. That’s the plan anyways we’ll see how long that lasts.

I’m setting my eyes on 3 dragons in Trove this month. I need 18 more Moonwing Dragon Souls to complete the last badge dragon. I’ve already unlocked the stat boost aura but still need the actual Dragon. This is where most of my dragon coins will be going.

I’m looking to collect the rest of the materials to hatch Typhandir, the Sundered Shield this month. I won’t have enough dragon coins to hatch him but the materials are locked behind time gates that I can knock out throughout the week.

Finally, I’m looking to get the rest of the sagely blue dragonscales for Shaoran, Sage of the Eastern Ranges. I realized last night that this one doesn’t require dragon coins so i can work on farming the last 24 scales I need to craft him.

I actually bought Shadowlands last week. I know, I know, I’m easily swayed…I’ve been leveling a mage this week and would like to see her at least get into the expansion before the end of the month. I’m currently level 25 so I’m confident I can hit that goal.

My last goal is to continue playing through The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. I started this late last month and have been firing it up when I feel like playing a single player game. It’s a long game so I’m not sure I’ll be able to finish it this month but I want to keep up with it. Otherwise, it’ll end up in the bottomless pit that is my backlog.