I thought it was about time for a check-in, although since I’m writing this, I’m not the one “checking in”; that would be you, if you’re reading this. I guess I’m “checking out”? But not like that! I meant that…Aww screw it. On to the nonsense.

Raspberry Pi

Still haven’t decided what to do with this device. I got some “advice” on The Medias from People Who Obviously Only Read the Title of the Last Post and didn’t read the fucking article in which I stated that I had a list of the most popular recommendations. How do I know they didn’t read it? They regurgitated their pet lists of the most popular recommendations. I didn’t say anything, because what’s the point? It’s not like those kinds of people read what is written anyway.

As my basement smart speaker finally gasped it’s last after a prolonged illness of whatever the hell was wrong with it, I was temporarily unable to shout commands into the void to turn lights on and off or play music from SiriusXM like the slug I am. Since I found this disconcerting, I spun up an instance of Homebridge on the Pi via Docker and connected to my smart devices through my phone. This allowed me to continue to not put effort into things that people have been putting effort into for over 100 years, like manually turning the lights on and off. Now I have a replacement smart speaker, so Homebridge has been put out to the virtual pasture. Why not keep it running if I found it useful? Redundancy, I suppose. I don’t want to make the decision that this is going to be the Pi’s job, even in part, in case I figure out some better use for it that would force me to deactivate Homebridge after I became reliant on it.

Cyberpunk 2077

For some reason I had the urge to go back to one of my three dozen unfinished save games in Cyberpunk 2077. In truth, I finally bit the bullet (pun intended) and picked up the Phantom Liberty DLC because I figured it would never dip lower than it’s historic and yet also consistent sale price of $22USD.

Honestly, this is one of my favorite games of all time. The environments are mind-blowing in their scale and detail, the characters are on point, the stories are amazing, and the variety of things to do is broad enough to provide me with enough to do without it seeming like I’m doing the same thing over and over. I think about the game’s mission structures like I think about Elder Scrolls Online’s mission structures in that once I pick a mission to work on, I have to ride it out as if it were the only story the game offers, and I am rarely disappointed in that take.

Dune Awakening

Real talk: I want to get into Dune Awakening. Why don’t you I that? I’ve spent money on stupider stuff; It’s not about the money. It’s not even about the drum beat of the game being PvP centric, or the weak platitudes offered by the developer to the PvE contingent.

It’s all about Funcom.

Funcom is one of those companies that has been…inconsistent with how they treat their products and their communities. I really enjoyed the The Longest Journey series, so that’s a plus. I also enjoyed Anarchy Online despite it’s turbulent beginnings. Age of Conan was pretty OK as well, I guess. Then came The Secret World, and I thought it was all over between me and other MMOs. I was so committed to this game and it’s concept that I threw down for a lifetime sub.

We know how that turned out. Not only did Funcom screw up TSW, they tried to “fix it” by creating another version of the game? When they couldn’t make that version work either, they put it into maintenance mode alongside Anarchy Online and Age of Conan. No more updates, expansions, or sequels. It seems, though, that they realized how much they suck at running MMOs and dropped that line of business in favor of another line of business: the survivalbox, in the form of Conan Exiles.

Now we have a Dune property, which is an IP I enjoy, made by Funcom, who I really fucking do not. They really want to stress that this is not an MMO, but a survival game with large-scale multiplayer features. Even they admit that they’re shit at supporting an MMO because they won’t even consider the term.

I expect this game to “do well” by Funcom standards, which is to say that it’ll be moderately successful, mainly because of the IP and not because Funcom makes good games, and they’ll probably support it for quite some time. I hope that Herbert Properties LLC did their homework regarding Funcom’s long term support history and put a dead-man’s switch into the license that says Funcom needs to make it work, or else they’ll be obligated to drag the corpse around their balance sheets until such time as HPLLC is sufficiently placated.

Star Citizen

Patch 4.1.1 has been pretty decent by Star Citizen standards. There are still more bugs than working code, but from the perspective of long-term and frequent players, whatever updates CIG is making in their so-far-monthly-or-so patches have been improving things — fewer crashes, every-so-slightly-less jank — as well as adding more content.

The “Flight School” training missions have been good for folks of my persuasion– read: those who aren’t experts at ship combat, prefer AI enemies, and just want discreet encounters and not a rolling war across the entire star system all the time. Each mission increases the stakes by making enemies “more difficult” which is in quotes because the AI in Star Citizen isn’t stellar even on it’s best days. As the missions progress the AI is replaced by simply bigger ships, which unfortunately means that the progress may dead-end unless a player has access to a good number of friends or commensurately large ships. My two friends and I, in pretty decent medium and heavy fighters, got stonewalled against the Hammerhead in mission 7 because we don’t have anything larger (or rather didn’t at the time). So while I applaud CIG for putting in this “training” series, there’s no way in hell a new player who approaches these missions with the intent to learn about space combat with NPCs is going to get much further unless they upgrade their ships beyond what three veterans have by way of personal craft. I think this series showcases how tone-deaf CIG is to a wider potential audience, as this mission series is tuned according to the belief that players are all in orgs and/or have access to any number of large, multicrew ships. I feel like they’ll get caught “unaware” come 1.0 when people who have never tried the game show up and find an even steeper initial experience than EVE Online had at launch; it’s taken EVE over 20 years to get a good new player experience, and Star Citizen cannot afford that kind of luxury.

But these missions and the two other mission types, patrol and ambush, grant a new in-game currency called scrip. This is a physical object, because of course it is — it has to be lootable by other players! — and can be converted into “Wikelo Favor” by the Banu trader Wikelo. This favor can then be used in quantity or as part of other requirements to pick up special weapons, armor, and even ships. It’s actually been pretty fun grinding for scrip through the training, patrol, and ambush missions, at least in that it gives us a reason to be doing ship combat against NPCs when we’d otherwise be doing delivery missions, mining, or salvaging.

To a similar end, we’ve started branching out and have been looking at FPS missions in and around the Hathor bases located around Stanton. These bases are used in the “align and mine” mission arc which requires players to activate three ground stations to get the batteries necessary to power and orbital mining laser that unearths a material that’s important to the MacGuffin storyline “The Regeneration Crisis” that’s going on right now. Aside from that mission, there are independent missions which send players to these ground stations, at which players can print key cards to unlock doors to rooms that hold unique loot. As always, it’s PvPvE because Star Citizen, so sometimes we get the whole place to ourselves, and sometimes we end up with other players on the ground at the same time.

This week should see 4.2 drop to the live servers, barring any of the usual CIG-sized catastrophes we have come to know and grit our teeth about. This is going to bring more mission types, the combat ATLS, some actual engineering gameplay, and it’s also going to bring stormy weather like the kind we saw during last year’s CitizenCon.

I don’t think we’re going to get the full weather experience as seen above, but we will be getting weather in Area 18. There are videos out there of weather in downtown A18 taken from the test universe, but I haven’t watched them as I prefer to experience it for myself when the patch is pushed to the live servers.