I tried the open beta this past weekend, because it was free. First, in marketing terms, it was a far better game demo than The Division 1 Open Beta, because you got into the action much faster, and didn’t spend your first 30 minutes just wandering around trying to find where to start. So in that sense, it’s much better. Other than that, there’s nothing much to report. It’s basically identical to the first game, except it takes more CPU and GPU power to run.

Oops it’s over a week into March and this post is still sitting here waiting for me to attach a picture to it. Hey guess what? I played Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress, 118 hours. ANTHEM Open Demo, 1 hour. I don’t think I turned on my PS4 at any point either. Why did I buy that contraption again? Well, there was a sale. And it’s the only way to play Bloodborne.

Last week there was a sudden burst of attention for that media juggernaut known as “Critical Role,” the Friends of the RPG community. They launched a Kickstarter to fund an animated show, and smashed through their goals and stretch goals and super stretch goals somehow within a negative amount of spacetime (or so it seemed, without actually paying that much attention), and the tabletop RPG corners of the Internet rejoiced.

My 2013 MacBook Air died recently. Don’t ask how, because it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done with an expensive piece of electronic equipment. Okay, I dropped it in some water. It wasn’t in the water for more than a second, and only the keyboard part was submerged, but that was enough. It continued to work while wet, surprisingly enough, but I immediately turned it off to let it dry out, and it hasn’t powered back up since.

Google announced a new gaming “platform” curiously named Stadia. It’s a lot of things, but in simple terms I’d call it a cloud gaming service, similar to that OnLive service that died a horrible death some time ago. But it’s more than that. On first glance, I’d say it has about as much chance of long-term success as OnLive did. It sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

Just some quick spoiler-free bullet points about the first five-ish hours of Sekiro, the latest game from From Software. It looks like a slightly-improved version of the Dark Souls 3 game engine. It has basically the same bleached-film aesthetic. I’m playing with mouse-and-keyboard to save my thumbs. The implementation is slightly better than Dark Souls 3, which was better than Dark Souls, but it’s still probably going to be “best” with controllers.

March was a veritable explosion of gaming variety for me. I dropped Dwarf Fortress like a hot potato (just when people were starting to like my videos, oops) and picked up Souls again in anticipation of Sekiro. Not that there’s anything wrong with Dwarf Fortress, but nothing compete when the From Software fever hits. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, 16 hours. The new game from From Software. I just love writing “from From Software” and do it every chance I can.

I’ve had nothing at all to write about for the last month except Critical Role and Sekiro. I can’t write about Critical Role because a) most people don’t care and b) any discussion of it would basically be 100% spoilers and c) D&D isn’t really my thing anyway. I can’t write about Sekiro because there’s nothing much to say except “I’m playing Sekiro.” It’s not the kind of game that lends itself to a lot of discussion.

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.

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: <a href="https://twitter.com/endgameviable/status/1121749352358215680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 26, 2019</a> Then I actually read the article and not just the title. Turns out Bree meant the character’s class and/or skills, not the appearance. It doesn’t really change my answer that much, to be honest. All the recent discussions of City of Heroes and the 20th anniversary of EverQuest leads us to falsely believe that modern MMOs remotely resemble the complicated games we used to play.

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.

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.

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.

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 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).

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.

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 wrote this tweet this morning: <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. But yeah, I didn’t pay much attention to E3 this past weekend. Other bloggers have much better recaps (eg. Belghast and Scopique, whose blog I have only just now noticed has moved).

Someone on Twitter asked a question that gave me an extremely rare idea for a blog post that I haven’t already covered before: Gaming Chairs. <a href="https://twitter.com/CommanderFlynn/status/1140582730452938752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 17, 2019</a> Much of the past 12 months I’ve been plagued by back troubles that have ranged anywhere from mildly annoying to severely crippling. The thing that triggers this back pain the most is: Sitting in a chair in front of a desktop PC.

I probably won’t play Final Fantasy XIV’s Shadowbringers expansion. I’ve had a lot of fun in Final Fantasy XIV but it occurred to me that the game isn’t made for me anymore. Bye bye spunky porcelain-faced Miqo'te in the Bain mask. That became really clear when I watched the Square Enix event for E3. At the end of the event, Twitter exploded with excitement over a bombshell surprise reveal. I watched the entire E3 event.

Bloodborne: It’s fantastic. I’m not even finished yet and it clearly deserves to go into my entirely fictional All-Time Hall of Fame Game Library. That’s it. That’s my impressions. If you like this kind of game, it’s a must-play. (If you don’t, then you probably won’t like it, because it is the quintessential version of this kind of game, the template from which all others of this kind of game are poorly copied.

Another super easy month to figure out. It was Bloodborne on the PS4. I basically only play one game at a time anymore, and have little interest in anything else until I finish with it. Bloodborne (PS4), ~50-60 hours. Time estimated by looking at how long I ran OBS Studio on my PC, which was 50 hours. However when I finished the game and entered New Game+ last night, the total save game time was 68 hours, but that extends a little bit into May as well.

I’ve heard about a thing in Final Fantasy XIV called the “Trust System.” I didn’t pay any attention to it. Why would I? It’s called a “trust system.” Typical of most things in Final Fantasy, there is nothing within the words of that name that even remotely implies what it actually *is*. If they had called it what it is, which is apparently “AI Party Members For Completing Main Scenario Quest Dungeons Solo,” then boy would my ears have pricked up fast.

I’ve just been reliably informed that next month is August. In fact, it will be August in just over two weeks from the time of this writing. (Which was yesterday, as of the time of this posting.) That means Blaugust is back. Head over there to Tales from the Aggronaut for all the details. Thanks to Belghast for making these awesome images available! I have to be honest. The idea of writing a blog post every day for a month elicits a heavy sigh from me.

I think I’m sufficiently setup for streaming now. I just have to push some buttons and I’ll be live on Twitch. I did a test this afternoon and everything seemed to work satisfactorily. I mean except for the part where the final frame of the video was me rubbing my nose in an awkward way, so that when the video ends my hand is frozen there on my nose and it looks weird.