Hunt: Showdown has one of my favorite video game theme songs ever. I would recognize it anywhere. Its so catchy it’s about the only thing I remembered about my time playing the game four years ago. It’s also stuck in my head right now after revisiting the game this week to check out the big 1896 update.
Port Sulphur Band does all of the in-game music for Hunt and is made up of Crytek employees. They do both the soundtrack music and all the trailers and event music. According to their Spotify bio:
Since their first album released in 2019, Port Sulphur Band have become a cult phenomenon, with over 26 million streams across three albums, and live shows in Paris, Las Vegas, and Frankfurt.
They have more music than I would have guessed. The original Hunt: Showdown soundtrack is just six songs coming in at 18 minutes long. I guess you just don’t need that much music in PVP game. They also have quite a collection of in-universe music outside of the OST. Their music gives more insight into the lore of Hunt and fits the vibe of the game perfectly.
The tragedy of Hunt:Showdown is it has such an interesting world but the only way to interact that world is through a PVPVE extraction shooter. This world of supernatural, wild west, with zombies and monsters and the hunters that battle them is ripe for good stories. I would love to see a story mode for this game – I’m not holding my breathe though.
Unfortunately, most of my story with the world of Hunt is walking around for 20 minutes without a soul in site and being mowed down by other players on my way to extraction.
I’ve been listening to the Heart of Thorns soundtrack on the way to work this week. Only the first handful of tracks though, because I’ve found some can lead to some spoilers. I can, in fact I probably will, write a whole post on how I got into listening to game soundtracks on their own but…this is not that post. Just something short and sweet for Saturday.
Heart of Thorns has some great music and I thought it would be fun to match up some screenshots I took to the tracks I’ve enjoyed this week.
I got a solid start in Heart of Thorns this week. I started the main story and ventured through the first two zones: Verdant Brink and Auric Basin. Neither of which I’ve fully explored yet. The story picks up right where the Living World Season 2 leaves off, naturally. There’s enough of a recap where I would have probably figured out what was going on if I didn’t go through Season 2 but I’m sure glad I did.
The first thing I noticed about this expansion? It’s freaking hard! Well, harder than Central Tyria was, for sure, and a bit harder than Dry Top and the Silverwastes. I did a quick Google search to see if this was the case or I was rusty after picking the game back up after a couple months. Google confirmed that Heart of Thorns is, indeed, harder than the core story. Apparently, it used to be even harder too! But I don’t mind, it’s forcing me to pay attention to what each new enemy does. Thematically, it makes sense too because we’re dropped in behind enemy lines on their home turf.
The zones are beautiful. I have a so, so, many screenshots! I really dig the untamed forest vibe with the lush greens and the tree filtered sunlight….amazing. Plus we’ve got frogs everywhere. Big frogs. Small frogs. Tree Frogs!
I’ve always heard how wonderful HoT’s vertical maps are. I thought I had some idea of what a vertical map was. Let me tell you, Verdant Brink was rough before I unlocked the gliding mastery. One minute I’d be happily cruising down a hill on my raptor, the next minute I’d be falling off a cliff to my death. It certainly made those first few moments in the jungle memorable.
I like the way the mastery system is laid out here. In the base game, the masteries nice, ok Auto Looting is very nice, but they felt like something to passively unlock while I was doing other things: i.e the main story post 80 or the living world stuff.
Masteries in Heart of Thorns, at least so far, unlock more features for getting around. Gliding helps you get places you couldn’t before, learning how to use the bouncing mushrooms let’s you get places you couldn’t before, the Exalted lore helps you navigate the world. Actually, I’m not sure on that last one, it least let’s you use the teleports in Tarir, which saves a few staircases!
I’m looking forward to getting that next mastery unlock to explore more than. I feel more inclined to explore in this expansion. That could be because I ran through Central Tyria so many times before but, I’m taking my time here.
In addition to masteries, I also like that the story (again at least so far) is broken up into a few missions and then a pause to unlock a new mastery. This has given me a chance to get familiar with the maps, hone my skills against the enemy types in the jungle, and run around and participate in events. It’s has some nice pacing to it, I haven’t felt like I’ve been itching to get back to the story before I’ve unlocked the next mastery.
I had read that the Hero Points were geared more towards multiple people completing them than the hero points in Central Tyria. They do provide ten hero points instead of one which might explain that. I thought I would have a problem completing these, but every time I started one up, there was always one or two people who came along and helped out. I’m looking forward to unlocking the Dragonhunter Elite spec and playing around with that!
It’s Creator Appreciation Week here in Blaugust-land. In years past, I’ve used topical week to talk about podcast that I love. I haven’t been listening to many new podcasts as of late, so this year I’m switching it up and giving a shout out to Parsec. If you’ve never heard of Parsec before, it’s an extremely low-latency remote desktop application geared towards gaming. And it’s free for personal use!
My main use for it is using it to play games that don’t support online multiplayer. My friend group is spread throughout the US so we use it a lot to play couch co-op games like the teenage mutant ninja turtles game. We’ve also used it to play single player games in the “pass the controller” style while sitting on our virtual couch like Little Hope.
I’ve been using it for years and it has always worked as advertised. We still get some latency, nothing is perfect, but for the most part controls are smooth and the frames don’t stutter much. We’ve even used it to play a mildly successful run of Dark Souls 3 where each of us were in charge of a single control of the character. I was on attacking, Blades was on healing and dodging, and CC was on movement. It was wild!
It’s a nice application, and while it can have some weird audio issues with Discord sometimes, I haven’t found another program like it.
Wilhelm’s No Man’s Sky post on Monday got me thinking about what kind of multiplayer experience No Man’s Sky actually gives it’s players. I tend to think that, while No Man’s Sky, has made so, so much progress since it’s release in 2016, the multiplayer experience hasn’t changed all that much.
Yes, before you tell me it didn’t have multiplayer when it launched, I know, I remember. I also remember it being weird that Sean Murray led players on that their might be days before the launch.
The chances of two players ever crossing paths in a universe this large is pretty much zero.
Now it does have multiplayer,it has for years, and still it’s as true now as it was 8 years ago, “No Man’s Sky is not a multiplayer game.” Can I see my friends? Yes. Jump around with them? Yes. Fly spaceships near each other? Also yes. Talk to them through an in game voice chat that, for some inexplicable reason, has the options to turn it off buried in the Network settings of all places? Unfortunately, yes. I can do all of that but there’s nothing to do together per say.
90% of the time spent playing No Man’s Sky with the Squad this weekend consisted of the four of us landing on a planet and immediately running in opposite directions. We did our own thing while chatting in Discord. I was doing this in 2016 too, I just couldn’t see any of them in the game. The only interaction we had with each other was meeting up and trading some materials with each other. Then it was right back out to do our own thing again.
I think this all stems from a few fundemental reason.
First, the world(s) isn’t all that dangerous. There isn’t muchthreat from anything besides the environment which can, often times, be mitigated by having enough supplies to charge all your bars or jumping back in your ship while they recharge. There isn’t a place you’re going to stumble in to that’s going to require someone else’s help. You’re rarely attacked and even if you are, you can probably get yourself out of a bad situation easily.
Second, there aren’t any shared objectives. Similar to above, there just isn’t anything that requires someone else help. There’s also nothing that brings you to the same spot for an activity. You can follow your friend(s)around from point of interest to point of interest but opening the same box as your buddy doesn’t add any value to the experience.
This all make sense, because again, “No Man’s Sky is not a multiplayer game”. Turns out, when you slap multiplayer on a game years later, it might be lacking.
Now, this may just be me not “getting” survival sandbox multiplayer. I think Palworld suffers from the same issue. Great as a solo game, servicable with two people, unbelievably boring with more than that. I want to play with people not around them. No Man’s Sky doesn’t offer meaningful ways to play together.
7 Days to Die, on the other hand, has a great multiplayer experience. The world is dangerous, made less so with a few pals. There’s a shared common goal of getting ready and surviving the Blood Moon. There are even shared quests from the Traders now. There’s always some reason to be within sight of another player.
All this to say, I don’t think No Man’s Sky offers much of a multiplayer experience.
Admittedly, we haven’t gotten very far in the game so I to see what we could do together. There, I found a lot of the same sentiment. One thing that did come up was doing Nexus missions together from the Anomaly. We haven’t tried these yest so maybe it will add some structure and a common goal for us to work on together.
I also came upon discussions of the Glactic Hub Project. This bills itself as a multiplayer Civillization which sounds kind of neat. It reminds me of the player groups that formed in Elite Dangerous:
The Galactic Hub Project is a multiplayer organization based in the video game No Man’s Sky. Founded in 2016, the Hub is No Man’s Sky’s largest and oldest active civilization. Our community features social events, PVP, sports, economic opportunities, creative writing endeavors, construction projects, and so much more. The wide variety of available content in our space has attracted the construction of over 2,000 bases in Hub space every year since 2020.
Last week, for the first time, I got a character through the Living World Season 2 content which triggers the first quest of Heart of Thorns . I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 off and on now for over a decade. It’s taken me quite a while to get here!
I’ve had numerous challenges getting started in Guild Wars 2 over the years. I was obsessed with Guild Wars in high school; Guild Wars 2 always felt like a game Ishould love. But each time I would start up a new character and run through the starting areas yet again, I encounter the same problems that cause me to bounce each time.
I didn’t gel with weapon swapping. It was all fun and games until I hit level 10 and this feature unlocked, Not being able to see the cool downs on abilities on the swapped weapon drove me crazy! It felt like I was guessing most of the time when to swap between weapons. Plus, I didn’t understand the combat system all that much which led to confusion about which weapons synergism together.
Not using both weapons in the attack animation when dual weilding the same type of weapon annoyed me. It bothers me to no end that the basic attack for dual weilded weapons only uses one hand. It’s not so much that the skills use separate hands for animations, but I always thought if I had two swords/daggers/axes/ whatever equipped my character should swing both of them for a basic attack. A petty reason to be sure, but it still bothers me.
Combat stats are slighty confusing. I understand that GW2’s whole thing is breaking the holy trinity and stuff but did it have to go and change all the standard stat names too? Easily solved by reading the descriptions of course. Not arguing there.
Over time, “Do I really want to run through Metrica Province again?” became a problem. After a few dozen attempts of leveling up past 20 all the starting areas are worn out. Every time I came back, I rolled a new character, ran the same handful of starter zones, got bored, and logged off months or years. Doomed to repeat the cycle once more.
With all that said, you would think I would have move on. I have no problem with dropping games normally – usually to my friends’ dismay. But there’s something about Guild Wars 2 that I want to like. Reflecting on it, part of it is definately nostalgia for the Guild Wars IP. I have such fond memories of playing that particular game with friends and participating in the end game stuff. One of the only MMO’s that I’ve really been deeply involved in. Some of the other features that I want to like are the horizontal progression, the miriad of things to collect, and the world is Just. So. Pretty!!
Over the winter, I took my annual tour through Tyria yet again. But something was different this time or maybe I was different. I created a Guardian, which I had always avoided doing because I I already had one of those. I made a Sylvari because I had spent the least amount of time in their starting area. I took my time to read the additional dialogue, the Renowned Heart text, the *ahem* tool tips for the combat stats and skills. Amazing right, when I actually sat there and read the descriptions of things they were not confusing at all. A revaluation, I know. I also went out and looked up some newbie guides just to make sure I had a basic grasp on everything.
On top of that, I found that weapon swapping didn’t really bother me any more. Once I started to understand the combat a bit better, I found that weapon swapping had it’s own rhythm to it. Now, I could still be doing it wrong, but my skills seem to be up on my secondary weapon by the time I run out of skills on my primary or very shortly after.
I was playing regularly for a month or two. I got through the core story for the second time ever. I went through the Living World Season 1 and got half way through Season 2. I was enamored enough that I bought the rest of the Living World I was missing along with End of Dragons and Secrets of the Obscure. Then I promply fell off the whole gaming train in general.
Flash forward to this week. As chance would have it, I accidentally clicked on the Guild Wars 2 launcher on my desktop instead of whatever game I was looking forat the time. I saw there was a new expansion coming out and got the inkling to play again. I had a blast last week finishing up the rest of the Season 2 story. Now I’m finally ready to start Heart of Thorns. I’m excited to see a part of the game I’ve never seen before, check out the whole gliding mechanic, see those vertical maps, and continue the story that has been set up for this expansion!
Over the weekend, the Squad made its triumphant return to No Man’s Sky. Everyone was eager to see what the new graphical update – well, looked like. I thought it might be cool to check out the new expedition too for something different.
In 2022, we started a save probably after the game was on some sort of Steam sale. We didn’t get very far evidenced by the fact that 3 out of the 4 of us hadn’t completed enough of the tutorial to get to the Anomaly, a kind of nomadic player/ upgrade hub fo the galaxy. It’s also, more or less, the end of the tutorial.
Apparently CC was using an old save since he had access to a freighter with an ungodly amount of raw resources. Which he judiciously doled out to the rest of us as needed.
I vaugely remember out last time through. We were making good progress I. the main questline when we landed on a planet with ancient bones all over the place. We stopped to check out what those were, then proceeded to strip mine the planet of its fossils to sell to the nearby space station for buckets and buckets of credits. As a result, loading in this weekend we all were rich and were greeted by some very stylish ships.
None of us could remember how to actually do anything. A good start.
Water planets are pretty now.
We puttered around for an hour, calling out key bindings when one of us stumbled upon them. Who wants to read through the keybindings in the settings right? The core mechanics of shoot things to gain resources paired with don’t let your bars deplete to zero came back fairly quick. I had some close calls while getting distracted and not replenishing my life support. But there are enough alarms and screen flashing to get your attention.
Toast and I didn’t have any launch fuel to get our ships off the planet so we set off to figure out how to do that first. Once we got that squared away, it was off to space to join up with CC and Blades on the freighter.
From there, we decided to check out the expedition. Now, you can start a new save file to go directly to the Expedition mode, but the Squad lies to do things the hard way. There’s another option to start the expedition from your current save via the Anomaly. We didn’t know this at the time, but this gives a slight advantage because you get to bring along some resources and technology from your current save along to pick up at a later time. The problem was, most of us didn’t have access to the Anomaly. We tried having CC call it in for all of us but it just doesn’t work like that.
Off we went to complete the main quest so we could all get access.
Waiting for Blades to get to the Anomaly
We weren’t far off. We had to build the warp drive to jump to another star system. Then do some exploring from planet to planet to get an event to trigger so we could meet up with the Anomaly. Once we had access, we had to run around and talk to everyone to fully unlock all the stations and vendors there. Then, and only then, could we start the Expedition. We didn’t have enough stuff to bring in to it so we all chose to start fresh.
The Liquidators Expedition focuses on combat which isn’t something I associate with No Man’s Sky. The only combat I’ve done is shooting at some Sentinels when they don’t like what I’m mining and attack. The expedition, on the other hand, comes with mutant bug creatures to shoot! Fun fact, the Sentinels still don’t like it when you shoot the bugs even in self defense. So my first encounter included running from bugs and the space police! They started it!
Not the most comforting sight when you wake up from a shipwreck
What was nice is that this game mode seems to assume you’ve played before. There’s a shortened version of the tutorial where you have to get your ship operational by collecting materials but you don’t have to go through much else to get going. This was a bit of a challenge because the planet we started on didn’t have much in the way of Oxygen plants which we needed to fix our ships. It took us all a good 20 minutes of running around to get enough of it.
With ships fixed, we went to space to find another planet to collect enough things to sell to buy Microprocessors for the warp drive. Along the way, we found a derelict freighter which turned out to be one giant box of loot. We spent the rest of the night running through the frieghter opening all the boxes and selling all the loot to the station. Now we all have warp drives and we’re ready really dig in to the expedition this week!
Hello out there! I don’t usually post on the weekends but during Blaugust I find that having some sort of re-occuring feature helps cover those days. So that’s what this is.
We are now at the end of week two, our first full week of Blaugust. Traditionally. “Lessons Learned” is the theme of the last week. However, I find that most years I’m wracking my brain to figure out just what I’ve learned. Often times, I seem to learn the same lessons year over . Maybe that’s because I always read my old Lesson Learned posts before I write a new one. Maybe I’m just prone to forgetting….Yeah, it’s probably that’s.
So this year I thought I would jot down some of my thoughts around the event each in the hopes that I might find some new wisdom at the end of all this.
Every year, I feel like I start to think about blogging differently around day 3 of the event. I find myself thinking about writing more often, brainstorming ideas in my downtime, and reading other blogs way more than I typically would the rest of the year. Nothing has changed here, I’m still doing all of these this year.
By the time this post goes live, I will have increased my post count for the year by 11 and exceed my post count for last year. That’s not bad, considering before Blaugust I hit publish on a grand total of 2 posts! It’s been fun getting back in to a routine this week. It’s a nice feeling to be creating something again rather than just consuming.
I’m definitely starting to feel that tug to write every day. Slowly but surely building that habit. Even if it is just for this month.
I ran out of scheduled posts halfway through the week. Kind of feel like I’ve been treading water ever since. 31 posts in 31 days is an aspiration for sure but, given that I’m still in the running, I might as well go for it if life permits. I’m taking this weekend to build up another set of posts to get back to that comfy buffer.
There are more blogs this year that are out of my typical reading scope. I’ve made a Blaugust feed separate from my Gaming feed to make sure I don’t skip out on these. Since I spend most of my time hanging around the gaming blog corner of the internet, it’s nice to see tons of personal blogs out there covering a wide variety of topics. Through some of these, I’ve been introduced to the concept of the IndieWeb which I’m finding really interesting the more I dig in to it.
As I suspected, getting back to writing has gotten me back to gaming.
I find myself in that precarious Blaugust situation where the scheduled posts have run out, it’s late, and I haven’t written a word yet. While I’m not explicitly going for 31 posts (it’s more of a low-key thing), I didn’t want the streak to end so early. So, as is the long standing tradition here at Many Welps, it’s time to pull out the ol’ Saturday screenshotspost!
I spent this week back in Guild Wars 2 finishing up the Living Story Season 2. Over the winter, the game had finally clicked for me after starting a new Sylvari Gaurdian. I ran him through the core story, up through the Living World Season 1 content, and about half way through Season 2 before quietly drifting away.
Finishing season 2 is the farthest I’ve gotten a character over the years. Despite that, I’ve owned Heart of Thrones and Path of Fire for what feels like forever. I played enough Path of Fire to get the Raptor mount when it first came out but I’ve never stepped foot in Heart of Thorn’s I’m excited to see what lies ahead!
You ever go to boot up a game that you could have sworn you played a few months ago, only to see its, in fact, been several months? I find this happening to me constantly. It’s like, I have such a strong memory of playing it that it must have been just last week. Or, at the very most, last month. It always leaves me with a funny feeling. Like time has suddenly rearranged itself around me. It’s quite jarring.
I found myself in this situation, once again, this week. Never quite to this extent though.
Blades suggested playing Sanctum 2 this week. If you’re unfamiliar, its’s a first person shooter,tower defense game from the people who brought us Goat Simulator. It features shooting bugs with guns and setting up bigger guns to shoot more bugs.
It was our main game for quite a while. We finished up the base game and purchased the DLC. We even beat most of that too. So I was down to revisit an old favorite.
I could have sworn we last played it over the winter but, lo and behold, Steam had it listed as last played in 2020. 4 years ago? I couldn’t believe it! Then I went digging through posts to see if I’d ever written about it. I was shocked (SHOCKED!!!)to find I wrote one in August 2019. I guess Sanctum left quite an impression on me.
Stepping away from a game for 4 weeks let alone 4 years is tough. Trying to pick up where I left off never ends well. The controls came back easy enough but trying to figure out what my load out was and why I had chosen it way back when was borderline impenetrable. I went with it anyway, past me knew what he was doing right?
We tried starting on the map we assumed was the one we left off on. That ended quickly. I think are some mechanics we forgot about over the years because we lost our core very quickly. Defeated, we went back to one of the easier levels on endless mode to get acquainted again.
I wish I could say it was exciting to revisit. I had really liked it before, after all.
But, as it all started coming back to me, so did the feeling of having done this all before. I’ve fought these enemies, built these towers, and ran around with these character for 40 hours already. There wasn’t anything new here. It was too familiar, and not in a good way.
Some games are just played out and are better left back in the “Recent Activity” graveyard.
Many Welps 