Endgame Viable

I wrote this tweet this morning: Man, when I hear people talking about E3, I realize I must not be a gamer AT ALL anymore, if I ever was. This must be what it feels like to leave Scientology. — Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) <a href="https://twitter.com/endgameviable/status/1138085833490276352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 10, 2019</a> It’s a tweet that deserves to be a full blog post. But I have this terrible habit of saying everything I want to say in two pithy sentences, with little room for expansion. Twitter is a great blogging platform. (744 words.)

This should be a pretty short list. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, 53 hours. I finished my first playthrough and started NG+. I got bored about halfway through NG+ though. 7 Days To Die, 2 hours. I don’t remember why I played this. I think I might have been playing it while listening to Critical Role early in the month. I have thoughts about the newest version but I can’t remember what they are at the moment. I got bored in Sekiro NG+ because the only thing that’s different the second time around is the new satisfaction of roflstomping all the bosses now that you know what you’re doing. Even carrying the Bell Demon around, NG+ is laughably easy thanks to the previous 75 hours of training. (334 words.)

The following is a list of Sekiro video episodes I recorded in my first blind playthrough, with descriptions for each. This is the document from which I will be cutting and pasting all my YouTube video descriptions. You can use this as a searchable index to see the odd path of progression I made through the game. One interesting thing about From Software games is that everyone plays it differently, and it’s fun to see how others may have taken different paths. For example, I seem to have gone through a lot of the early to middle part of the game backwards from what was intended, since I put off the Genichiro fight for a long time. (9036 words.)

I finished my first blind playthrough of Sekiro* this past week, so I can finally post my thoughts about it. It took me two months and two days, or 76 game hours by the game’s accounting. I recorded 95 roughly 25 minute videos documenting the journey. There might be some minor spoilers below, but nothing about the story. I'm part of the 22.7% club! Now I enter the second phase of playing every From Software game: Learning about all of the things I missed or did wrong the first time, as I finally go around reading about the game (a little bit, at least-there is still a lot I can discover about the story and different endings on my own). (2247 words.)

Yes, I’m still playing Sekiro, so nothing else to talk about. I will publish a massive, massive post when I’m done (I’m on what I think might be the final boss as I’m typing this, then I have some backtracking to do). I’m aware that there’s a new episode of GW2 but I couldn’t care less. I’m aware that WoW Classic is in beta but I couldn’t care less. I’m aware that there’s a new thing coming for ESO but I couldn’t care less. I’m aware that City of Heroes is ironically the most exciting and popular new MMORPG out now but I couldn’t care less. (3237 words.)

I’m still playing Sekiro, so not much to write about until I’m finished with it. Until then, more notes on Game of Thrones! Thought I should post them before the new episode airs to lock in my predictions for the Internet office pool. Episode 4 Seeing from Twitter that there are spoilers for the episode and not even 5 pm yet. Was there another leaked episode? Probably. Undoubtedly. I had to find the leaked episodes last season so I could watch them before people posted spoilers from them. Was a pain. (2245 words.)

The following is a slightly edited but mostly unedited copy of the notes I take while watching Game of Thrones. I watch with a laptop and bash out thoughts as they occur to me, then I go back after the show and fill in extra details in brackets. I had ideas of turning these notes into real posts but since I never did it for season 7, and there’s over 4,000 words of stream-of-consciousness commentary down below, at this point you just get what you get. (5888 words.)

It’s been another odd gaming month. I thought I would be playing a lot of Sekiro, but it turns out I’m just not in the mood for it, or any games really. I’ve gotten much more enjoyment from consuming plain old non-interactive video content in my free time (ie. mostly Critical Role). Sekiro, 28 hours. I am currently on the “Guardian Ape” boss and not terribly interested in putting in the repetitive practice needed to get past it. I’m also recording my playthrough so I not only have to be in the mood to play the game, but also in the mood to record and talk about it, so it’s doubly difficult. Honestly I’m not enjoying it as much as the previous Souls games. 7 Days To Die, 16 hours. I’m pretty surprised I played for this long actually-I feel like some of this might be AFK time. Anyway, this is the game I’ve turned to when I want to do something with my hands while listening to Critical Role. The newest version (17.2 I think) seems to have a lot more difficult survival mechanics than previous versions. Albion Online, 3 hours. I tried out the free-to-play release. I found it was surprisingly interesting in the first hour but it became apparent in the second two hours that the gameplay would probably never change, so I felt like I’d seen everything the game had to offer. Conan Exiles, 2 hours. I tried it again for the first time since the Early Access launch. I thought more would be different, but it’s still pretty similar. The new combat didn’t seem like much of an improvement to me. Anyway, since the map was the same, I didn’t really want to repeat what I’d already played before. Elder Scrolls Online, 2 hours. Continuing the search for the elusive hook to get back into that game. Just can’t find it. No PS4 games. I didn’t even turn it on in April. (327 words.)

MassivelyOP asks: “How obsessively do you plan your characters?” At first I thought they meant the *appearance* of your character. So I tweeted my usual I-can-say-everything-that-needs-to-be-said-about-MMOs-in-one-sentence-and-hoo-boy-does-that-make-blogging-hard response to most discussion topics: Honestly these days I just click randomize a bunch of times and then "Enter Game" … I've been burned so, so many times spending an hour in character creation only to find that everyone looks exactly the same from the back. (797 words.)

Literally the only superhero-related screenshot from a game I have. This is Colossus from Marvel Heroes. The big story in MMORPG news lately is about City of Heroes, the second-most talked about dead game after Star Wars Galaxies. Apparently, somebody has been working on (yet another) City of Heroes emulator in secret. There’s a lot of drama around it, because of course there is. I don’t know all the details and it’s tiresome to read through the articles about it. (742 words.)