Such Releases

It's a busy week in gaming. I'm only going to hit upon the games that I'm directly involved with, and have either bought already, received updates to, or will be pre-ordering ASAP. But man, this week has made it hard to fit in all the possible gaming activities.

Final Fantasy XIV

4.2 Patch - Rise of a New Sun

(Source: Square Enix)

After a massive 24 hour patch, Final Fantasy XIV saw the Rise of a New Sun content patch launch. I didn't get into the game immediately, as I run the content patches Main Story Quests with my boyfriend, and I was pretty busy with other stuff during the day. There's a lot going on in this patch, as the notes outline, though really, the true end game of Glamour is the real theme of this patch.

Unfortunately, I ended up having crashing issues related to AMD's ReLive and most recent drivers. I ended up having to backdate to the 16.11.5 driver set, which was the last set that did not have ReLive in it. What's odd is that I did not install ReLive at all, but I suspect that there's ReLive related architecture in the drivers and the Adrenaline software. And this really sucks, because it raised the resolution potential of my video card; I mean, my card is supposed to go higher, but it's in a motherboard that only runs on 2.0, but I believe due to the downcycling from 3.0 to 2.0, it never got pased 1920x1080 until the Adrenaline series, even though the card was supposed to go far past that.

So, because it took a while to figure out what the core problem was, we didn't get to do the MSQ last night, as my boyfriend had to get sleep for work today. I did end up playing with the new Glamour system, unlocking the new Fashion Report game, and emptying my alt's inventory pretty significantly. Found new housing items to tweak the FC Hall a bit, though I'm still going to try to move the hall to a Large in the new Shirogane districts, as soon as they open to purchasing.

Later today will be MSQ time.

Monster Hunter: World

Last Friday, this game dropped. So many people I know got it - pretty much my entire Household got it, many of the people in my FC/Alliance in XIV got it, my best friend and his gaming cabal got it. Tonnes of people in the XIV communities I hang out in got it. It's insane how many people got it and are actively playing it. I can dip in to so many different sessions, and just have active hunts immediately. Or I can play alone if I want. It's been great.

This is my first MH game. I didn't have either of the Wiis. I did end up with a DS a bit over a year ago, however I didn't really have anyone playing via the DS - and everyone was telling me it was the best with friends. So since I don't have much of an income at this time - and at that time - I passed on it and waited.

I'm finding the game a tonne of fun. Palicos are the best, and the scenes with the Canteen Palicos are amazingly worthwhile, and I absolutely love them; even though they can be skipped, I never skip them...though they do make me hungry. As unrealistic as the size of the food ingredients can be, they look so fantastic, especially the finished product - it's mouthwatering.

Weapon wise, I enjoy the hunting bow, however it's not exactly a good soloing weapon. I've been trying out the rest of the weapons, and I'm just not finding one that I'm catching on to that's good for soloing and enjoyable. While there's plenty that do enough damage to solo efficiently, nothing has really clicked yet. I may just need to stick to the bow, and constantly drop into people's sessions and ride coat tails, as it were.

But I do like the game. I desperately need to advance the process of getting a 4k monitor so that I can run the game on the graphic settings it's meant to be played on, because it's already super gorgeous graphically, and it has settings for HD - I can only imagine what it would look like on a really good monitor. And I need a 4k TV for my rendering work anyroad.

Dissidia NT & Dissidia Opera Omnia

A PS4 Fighter and a Mobile RPG Gatcha

(Source: Square Enix)

While I have tested Dissidia NT several times prior to the release, and actually went through the hellacious process to get the Japanese version of Opera Omnia before the sudden global release, between the two, I've found I'm way more excited to get into Opera Omnia and actually get the whole story figured out now that it's in English, because I don't actually know a whole lot of Japanese.

I am not a huge fan of gatcha/lootbox mechanics, however unlike a lot of other mobile RPGs, Opera Omnia actually gives you all of the characters up front through the story quests rather than via gatcha banner pulls. The gatcha here is all gear, which does give you advantages to stats and skills, but at least I get my favourite characters without having to pour shite tonnes of money into the gatcha.

Dissidia NT does have some story, but it's not nearly as rich as Opera Omnia, and they do compliment one another - which is why I was saying months ago that I suspected OO was going to be dropped with NT, however there was no confirmation till a couple of weeks ago when a rather quiet pre-registration campaign for a global version of OO dropped via Twitter and Facebook. It wasn't nearly as loud as the pre-registrations for Brave Exvius and Mobius were, which was really disappointing; there were, however, over 200,000 combined pre-registrations between Facebook, Twitter, and Google Play - but nothing like Brave Exvius or Mobius.

World of Warforver

Battle for Azeroth tries to reinvent the wheel, but largely fails

(Source: Blizzard, but ripped off their site by myself)

Now, I give Blizzard some massive props for what seems to be a real redefinition of the world map this time. It seems they are actually going to turn Azeroth on it's ear, and redifine the entire map and who can go where and where what is, which is something a lot of games don't dare to do - but should. Hubs should move, places should change, there should be real impact on the world based on what the players do. That's immersion and progression. I'm really hoping that's what this map in the trailers indicates. It may spice up WoW in a way that is somewhat needed on a mechanics end.

I don't, however, like the dive back into the stale two sided faction war. I've always found two sided faction wars uninteresting, if they're strictly two sided. If you can throw in a third faction, or give something like an underworld the way Star Wars does - anything that breaks up the monotony of the freaking two sided unreal bullshit.

Sure, the addition of Allied Races makes for an interesting twist to the racial systems, and they do, apparently, for the more part have some great storytelling. They seem to be well done, again with better models than the ones we've seen before, and hopefully more of the older models will continue to be upgraded.

However, the return to the strict Horde vs Alliance dichotomy after it was successfully bridged so many times, and so much progress was made time and again - even Varian had changed his mind, for fuck's sake - is just more of a step backwards than innovation for the game.

We'll see how it ultimately plays out, but in the end, this is more of a return to the faction war that most people didn't want.

At the moment, I haven't been able to pre-order the expansion, because everything else has sucked up the funds. I'm also super hesitant on the whole return to the faction war thing, so I'm almost thankful to have the delay on it. Hopefully, more will be revealed to show that this isn't going to be a stale shitshow.

Conclusion

Busy busy times in gaming. Not only is there all this content, I continue to run a long standing role play free company in Final Fantasy XIV that I run bi-weekly events for along with just regular hanging out. I also still am toying with The Sims Cats & Dogs as well as Star Wars: Battlefront 2.

And I never finished Persona 5, heathen I am.

While there are many mistakes being made by the gaming industry, there are still a lot of good things going on. We should seriously look at the good things, be wary of the questionable things, and rally against the bad things to bring about change or stop changes we don't like.

Lastly, I'm working again on setting up my broadcasting stuff. (Twitch)[] for live broadcasts and then I'm looking into YouTube and DTube for archiving and pre-recorded pieces - links for those later. I had started up on a Twitch dig back in November of 2016, but a car wreck on Election Day killed it. We'll see how it goes this time.