Endgame Viable

Even “super intelligence” can’t think of an appropriate title for this mixed bag of disparate topics. (I ended up writing the title myself.) A major problem with blogging like this is that people will skip it immediately if it looks like a “newsletter” style of post. At least that’s what my statistics tell me.

Anyway I’m still here, trying to adjust to the impending time of year when all I want to do is go back to sleep the minute I wake up. How many more months until spring?

Gaming

Final Fantasy XIV

In my continuing attempts to catch up before Evercold, I’ve started into the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker 6.1 Main Scenario Quest with my brand new Hrothgar Warrior of Light. Thus continuing what I believe is my longest-running video series I’ve ever uploaded (9 years, 363 videos so far), documenting the MSQ quest-by-quest going back to the start of Stormblood. What I read seems to be accurate: 6.1 is a good starting point for a new character to come in.

The return to the simple adventurer lifestyle was quite quickly supplanted by lofty talk of Reflections and The Thirteeth and Voidgates and so forth, so my initial excitement for a less, you know, “Final Fantasy”-sounding story for a while was almost immediately dashed. In a moment of inspiration, I recently called this type of plotline a “Final Fantasy slurry.” Can we not raid one set of ruins for treasure without it turning into a whole thing?

To be honest, the vast majority of FFXIV “gaming” has largely consisted of reading quest text and running from one place to another place. Glorified visual novel stuff. I haven’t done very much of the more traditional style of gaming where you make decisions and problem solve and overcome obstacles for quite some time.

World of Warcraft Forever

The rest of the MMORPG world is talking about World of Warcraft Forever. I signed up for the beta but I don’t think I got anything for it. I’m curious, but not curious enough yet to drop everything and pre-order it. However, it could well be the closest thing to a high-profile “new” AAA MMORPG that we will see for the rest of our lives. The MMORPG community seems to be treating it as such.

The little bit I’ve read about it makes me think that WoW Forever is not going to be designed to be very solo-friendly though. Not at first, at least. Once they see engagement plummet and learn the entirely predictable lesson that 95% of the player base still prefers grouping-optional, non-PvP content, I’m sure that will change.

I suspect I’ll try it at some point, but I crash out of WoW pretty quickly. I gave up on Midnight after only a handful of videos. These days I prefer games that make good video recordings (or more precisely, that make good audio recordings), and WoW just isn’t good for that.

ArcheAge again?

Speaking of the MMORPG community, I will note a couple of articles on Massively OP that caught my attention:

• ArcheAge S Strait of Freedom discusses its sandboxy game loops, design choices, and monetization | Massively Overpowered
• ArcheAge Chronicles previews the design of the Berserker | Massively Overpowered

I have to admit I don’t remember what happened to ArcheAge, but I do remember that I enjoyed playing ArcheAge for some time around ye olde 2015. Are there not one, but two new ArcheAge games in development? A quick look at their web pages and a quick consultation with ChatGPT makes me think that they will only resemble the original ArcheAge in name only.

I saw the words “action combat” on ArcheAge Chronicles so that pretty much makes it an automatic failure before it even launches. Or at least, an automatic extremely short-term MMORPG.

I hate to be negative, because I’m always called out for it, but I simply can’t help seeing the reality of the world before me. When was the last action combat MMORPG that remained in the MMORPG zeitgeist for years and years? I honestly can’t think of any. Maybe TERA?? Whatever happened to TERA? [Last-minute editor’s note: Also Black Desert.]

I just don’t think anyone has yet solved the problem of how to make action combat “feel good” in an MMORPG, and at this point it’s hard to justify any optimism that it will ever happen. Most of the time they try to wallpaper over the lag and positional issues with extremely flashy, pixel-obscuring lights and explosions. Even Dark Souls multiplayer, the action combat blueprint for most of the industry, isn’t perfect. But hey, maybe ArcheAge Chronicles will finally be the one to crack the code. Good luck to them.

GTA VI

Oh lastly I wanted to mention the impending worldwide extinction event known as Grand Theft Auto VI. I will quite likely be buying it and trying it out, though I haven’t really been into the whole GTA thing since I guess it was San Andreas.

But I’ve been hearing so much about how many genuine gaming innovations are in this game, and I can’t help but reward AAA studios that continue to attempt to move the gaming industry forward beyond just “more microtranscations.”

Mortal Shell 2

Oh and lastly for real, I just downloaded Mortal Shell 2 to see if there’s anything to it. I bounced off of the first one pretty quickly. I found that it looked fantastic, but it felt awful in terms of game mechanics.

But maybe this new one will be my next quick-thinking problem-solving game.

Videos

For the folks who were waiting patiently for my daily game video upload, I noticed that my script had been throwing errors and I hadn’t uploaded anything for a week. I should probably work out some way for that script to notify me when something goes wrong.

Not that you missed much. It stopped in the middle of my extensive 3-session EverQuest Legends spree.

Music

By the way, I mentioned a while back that I was building a new REAPER DAW workstation. I completed that, but almost immediately found myself interested in other things. So that’s on the back burner again. Sigh. Quite annoyingly, my interests are constantly changing.

Sports

In sports news, week 3 of the 2026 NFL season is in the books.

The Washington Commanders pulled off an upset win at home against the defending Superbowl champion Seahawks to avoid a third loss in a row to start the season. After dropping their first two road games against divisional opponents, and losing Jayden Daniels to another elbow injury, it was looking suspiciously like their season was already over. But there’s still a glimmer of hope for a serviceable season, especially after the Eagles were embarrassed by the Bears on Monday night, and the Cowboys lost a thriller to the Ravens in Rio.

Next up for the Commanders are the Colts in London (what is up with trying to export the NFL to the rest of the world?), then a road game at the Giants, two winnable games. Which they hopefully will win because after that is a road trip to San Francisco which does not sound like a winnable game.

Cancer Corner

I’m just exiting the worst part of chemotherapy cycle 22. Prior to that, I completed radiation treatments on my right hip for an area that they were calling an area of progression. However, my oncologist made it sound like it could possibly have been there all along. They weren’t sure.

In any case, they ordered a new Guardant blood test to see if anything had changed in terms of the genetics of the cancer, to see if they need to make any adjustments. My next PET scan is scheduled for late in October.

Other than chemo side effects, which typically hit me a couple days after the infusion and last three or four days, I remain fairly unaffected by the whole thing. (Not counting the time commitment of driving out to all these outpatient appointments.) The lung tumor that started everything is currently inactive and “treated,” as they call it, apparently akin to a lump of dead cells. However it’s not entirely clear to me if it’s dead forever or just sort of dormant. Cancer is complicated.

How long this reasonably good status continues is anybody’s guess.

World Context

I haven’t mentioned the state of the world in a while. Honestly it’s not a top priority in my life.

There’s so much non-substantive idiocy coming out of the American political scene that it’s impossible to wrap your head around it. The only sane reaction, it seems to me, is to ignore everything, vote when it’s time to vote, and go about your day. (Truly: I honestly believe that most controversies are manufactured to generate reactions (aka. “engagement”), so if we stop reacting, the ludicrous controversies will eventually return to normal levels of boring political scandal.)

I find it pretty amusing that both political party labels are so toxic now that candidates no longer identify which party they’re running for during the deluge of political ads that I see during football.

There simply isn’t any political news or commentary content that doesn’t jump at every daily Twitter story of the day. It’s gotten to where I have to watch an Australian comedy show “Have You Been Paying Attention” to find out what’s happening in the world.

A Funny Video For Gen-X

And finally a video I stumbled upon that made me laugh a lot. I have no idea why it was recommended to me, and have never heard of this guy before. But I’ve seen a handful of other “Gen-X content” sort of videos lately–e.g. shorts of a dour Gen-Xer asking young people “how hungry was Duran Duran?” and “what did Huey Lewis want?”–so maybe it’s because I watched those.

That’s my generation! We just kind of don’t care about pointless things. I work in a huge corporation but luckily I don’t have to endure any of that. (Not yet at least.) I would have that exact reaction if I did.