Week End – Summerset, FFXIV 4.3

News and observations from the past week.

In The News

Steam is (allegedly) cracking down on sexytime cartoon games. I say “allegedly” only because I personally couldn’t confirm any official communications from Valve, I only read the second-hand reports from potentially affected developers. This caused a bit of an uproar in the Twitterverse. My only two cents is that this is an example of one of the many universal truths in life: You can choose to make an artistic statement or you can choose to make money, but very rarely can you choose both. Especially when you hitch your business wagon to someone else’s selling platform, be it Steam, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, network television, or any of a million other examples, you inevitably run into boundaries and limitations, and they can change on a whim.

Elder Scrolls Online’s Summerset Chapter launched on PC. As I’m not finished with the vast majority of the content I’ve already purchased, I’ll just wait for a sale on this one.

Final Fantasy XIV patch 4.3 launched this week. I almost subscribed for just one more month so I could play through the story and see the new Alliance Raid, but it would be more cost effective to wait for every other patch, sub for a month, and play two patches in a row. Aywren’s observations about 4.3 suggests I probably made the right call.

Runescape Classic is shutting down August 6th. I think “Classic” is a different product from the “Old School” RuneScape that I’ve heard mentioned a lot in the news recently. For myself, I only briefly played the very first version of RuneScape, which, as I recall, ran in a browser with Java. Was that the “Classic” version? I don’t know.

TotalBiscuit died this week. I’m not sure what to call him: YouTuber? Gaming personality? I’ve never followed or listened to him, I only know he developed a controversial reputation that still persists. But I think his passing deserves a mention, regardless of what you might think of him, for this one reason: I remember years back, when I saw the news he had terminal cancer, that I really respected his decision to be public and candid about it. I think as a society we tend to sweep death and dying under the rug, but we would be better served to talk more openly about it.

My Week

I played BioShock Remastered and Dungeons and Dragons Online this week.

I’m devastated to report that the bird nest outside my back door came to a sudden traumatic end Tuesday morning entirely due to my own neglect. I don’t know exactly what happened, but after I let my cat outside, I got distracted with my computer for about 15 minutes, and when I returned to check on everyone, the nest was empty, and my cat had one of the fledglings on the grass nearby, and it did not survive. I found one other bewildered fledgling on the ground, which flew away into the woods when I approached. I don’t know what happened to the other two but I assume they also flew away. I’ve heard and seen the parents peeping and flying around since then, so I’m hopeful those three fledglings are surviving out there in the woods somewhere. I’ve spent most of the week trying to recover from a bottomless well of shame and guilt for failing my one and only job of keeping a close eye on my cat.