This is what we in the business call a “placeholder post”: it doesn’t do anything except keep the door open or in this case, remind people that this blog exists.

Blaugust 2025

It’s time for Blaugust, the annual festival of the Electronic Written Word. Although we are now in an age where video is the preferred method of presentation, some of us still like to express ourselves by putting fingertips to keyboard. I am a fan of video production and all that it entails, but it takes so damn long to get a proper, eye-catching video out into the world, what with the planning, the recording, the editing, and all of the (mostly annoying ways creators lean into) punching up of the final product. Blogging is simple as it can be done with just a web page of any stripe, a means to enter text, and s desire to say something about something. In fact, it’s that last part that’s the hardest.

All Blaugust posts are blog posts, but not all blog posts are Blaugust posts. I “participated” last year in a pique of solidarity, but this year I’m sitting it out. As you can probably tell from my creatively named posts as of late, I don’t have a whole lot to say that interests me enough to say it, and I assume that means that even fewer people would be interested in hearing it if I felt that I had to pump out posts on the regular. There was a time when I blogged like it was a religious experience and it was fun back then. Now, though, I feel that while I have the desire to write, that might only be the muscle memory of having done it for so many years — I’ve been blogging in some form since the late 1990’s — and not because I have anything super important to say, or expect that I’m saying anything that anyone wants or needs to hear.

If there’s any advice I can give to anyone who finds this post through some convoluted connection to Blaugust 2025 and is wondering why they should write posts instead of making stupid faces for TikTok, it’s this: writing, whether electronically or by hand, doesn’t have just one speed. It can move as quickly or as slowly as you need it to. When inspired, words can come easily; when bored, sometimes it’s more difficult to get the urge to write or to find the right words. Every post is written one word at a time, and each word is an opportunity to consider and reconsider what it is you want to convey, and you can take as long as need to take in order to say what it is you want to say, or even to decide if it’s worth saying at all.

Dune: Awakening

I think I’m done with Dune, certainly with at the pace at which I played since launch. Playing on a private server with like-minded folks was a massive boon that allowed me to play the way I wanted to play, and I think I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve touched all of the features of the game that I wanted to touch. Now the gameplay is simply a case of collecting resources, building things, and doing missions for narrative Reasons; I’m not even sure what the narrative is, so that aspect isn’t really a driver for me to continue on a regular basis.

There are problems with this, though. The first is that Funcom hasn’t made it possible to back up private servers. I admit that this is something I did not consider back when I decided to rent one. The original plan was just to have a place where my friend and I could play without having to deal with taxes, and we’ve played enough of these survivalbox games together to know that at some point, we’ll both get tired and just quit without any hard feelings from either side, but then other folks asked to be part of the community so the player base expanded. Now the server is home to more people than I had originally anticipated, which makes me responsible for their progress. If I could download a backup of the server then I could hand it off to someone else so they could spin up their own, but since I can’t, I need to keep the server running for as long as they want to play. After that…what happens? Have I committed myself to running this server forever, in case someone wants to return to Arrakis in a few months or even years? That kind of leads into the second issue, which is that unless touched on a regular basis, all of my stuff in the game is going to decay. That means all of my equipment, vehicles, storage containers, and buildings are going to be destroyed by the merciless nature of Arrakis. Even if I wanted to return in the future, I’d have to start over. Unlike other games where you might be able to put your progress in stasis for a while, if you walk away from Dune: Awakening, eventually there’ll be nothing left of your previous life to return to.

Terminull Brigade

The heat of this summer season is getting to me, folks, and as a result I’m not feeling the pull of any long-term, involved games (especially since I’m now Dune-d out). This has sent me in search of short session, pick-up-and-go games. I’ve been playing He is Coming, which is a simple and relatively short rogue-like adventure game, and Xenopurge which is a keyboard driven rogue-like a la Duskers (explaining something with something else that needs explanation isn’t helpful, I know). I think the “rogue-like” thing is one reason why I picked up these two. I don’t have to worry about long-term goals, I can get in and do My Thing, and it’s understood that I’ll be starting over the next time I play. I guess this is why I’ve given Terminull Brigade a shot.

Terminull Brigade is a F2P solo or co-op “hallway” rogue-like combat game…thing. I don’t know what the modern term is for it. Basically, you choose a character. Each character has a basic attack, two power abilities, and one ultimate. You and yours then move between different area environments, like a city square or a secret lab, and take on waves of enemies that come at you from different directions. After the wave is complete, you move to the next zone, and the next, and the next until you get to the boss who appears in a larger, more open area and attacks with typical boss-encounter-specific abilities. When complete, you get to level up yourself, maybe spend some currency on cosmetics or whathaveyou before you head into the next tier of combat. It’s not open world, and you can match-make in a lobby if you want to play with randos, but each “run” is specific to itself and exists just to collect coins and earn points to unlock skills and passives. Honestly, I haven’t sat down to suss out the specifics, so you’re getting the “as much as Scopique knows about it” explanation here.

Of course there is a cash shop, and people on Steam have been complaining that while you get a free operator to start with, the others are locked behind a paywall, which is bad faith: I played a whole one round so far and have five operators, with a few more coming to me in the near future. Like The First Descendent (again, IYKYK, sorry) you can pay as much or as little as you like to unlock stuff, depending on how irrational your FOMO is about Things in Video Games You Believe You MUST Have, and that’s not the fault of the game, it’s just poor impulse control.

I feel like this is scratching an itch right now because the game is bright, it’s kinetic and allows me to turn off my thought-processes, and it’s quick to get into and out of. It’s got more meat to it than He Is Coming or Xenopulse, which are both pretty retro in appearance and feature-set, so I’ll keep at it and see if this game has legs or if it’s going to languish in my Steam Library starting sometime next week.

Star Citizen

Every post has to end with Words About Star Citizen because if you don’t care about Star Citizen then you know exactly where in the post you can stop reading.

4.2.1 is not as bad as 3.18 was, but it’s got to be a close second. The “Regen Crisis” storyline that CIG is patting themselves on the back over is starting to wind down, and this phase has players moving cargo for one of the Big Four corporations as a means to get resources to help find a solution. That’s the smoke, so the mirrors are that players can align with any or all corporations and as they deliver SCU (standard container unit) for their chosen overlord, they get points from the corp. There are five milestones per corporation that grant free items to players, like a corporate-branded armor set, VOLT weapons (CIG loves their VOLT weapons), and skins for ships and such. At the end of the event, the corporation that saw the most contributions will have it’s brand assigned with the Stanton-Pyro jump point, and players who contributed to that corporation will get a permanent 5% discount on goods purchased at that station.

How’s it going, you didn’t ask? As well as we can expect for Star Citizen. The load bearing mechanism here are the freight elevators, as the easiest and quickest way to move these resources is to pick them up at an outpost (there are combat-leaning missions as well, but those have their own issues, apparently). This requires players to visit the outpost they are assigned by the mission, and use the freight elevator to get the goods that can then be tractor-beamed into the player’s ship. Of course, out of all of the places where missions send players, there’s at least an 80% chance the freight elevator will not work. Players then have a choice to make. They can either:

1. Abandon and take another mission, hoping that they’ll eventually get assigned an outpost where the elevators work.
2. Hop servers.
3. Get angry and log out immediately upon discovering that the freight elevators where they landed are busted.

Judging by the number of derelict ships around almost every outpost location in Stanton, the overwhelming majority of the player-base chooses #3.

CIG has been pushing hotfixes designed to address the elevator issue, and while they might have shaved off a few rough edges, the bulk of problems persist. In fact, this weekend saw the opening of the 4.3 test server gates to everyone and the patch notes indicates further attempts to fix the elevator issue. We are now at the point where show-stopping bugs are being addressed not just by hotfixes, but across patch iterations. While that sounds like the kind of thing developers should be doing, you need to know about 4.3 to understand the punchline.

The 4.3 patch was originally to include the first specially *cough* PvE *cough* content in the game. The gist of this is that players must visit one of 100+ labs and complete some kinds of tasks. Which tasks are up to the mission configuration, but can include repairing machines, finding codes and hard-drives, and even — wait for it — feeding dead NPCs into a biomass reactor. I’m working off of the recounts from the first waves of testers, so I don’t have specifics beyond these examples, but the facilities players go to are said to be massive, akin to traditional MMO dungeons or even raid zones. On it’s face, this is the kind of content that would make me log in on the regular.

Of course, while we will be getting these locations in 4.3, the actual meat of the content has recently been pushed out to 4.3.x, hopefully 4.3.1. The real take-away here, though, is that CIG is releasing this content while the previous patch’s content is still broken as fuck. The analogy that immediately fights its way to my forebrain is “throwing gasoline on the fire and claiming that it’s water”.

Of course, game development is hard, man! and I’m under no illusions that there’s a switch somewhere at CIG’s swanky and expensive HQ that they can flip to “make it better”. I am wondering what the root cause of the elevator issue is — not that the specifics would mean much or even matter to me, personally — what it is that’s making it such a bear to tackle, and exactly what the hell is going on at CIG that prevents them from getting their Top. Men. (and Women, that was a Raiders of the Lost Ark reference nevermind, skip it) on this. If their best and brightest are already assigned to the issue, then…what the hell? How did such an egregious problem reach the live servers? Are there not enough people on the test servers? Of those on the PTU, how many are logging issues? Does CIG have automatic logging (I assume they do) that can alert them to issues? There just seems to be so many points of failure that makes it look like CIG is simply shoveling code out the door, and even they don’t know if it’s working or not until players start flaming on Spectrum.

Now, in their defense, patch 4.2.1 has only been out for two, maybe three weeks at this point? Going from “it wasn’t happening on the test server!” to “holy shit the game is burning down!” and then to “it’s fixed!” in that amount of time is potentially asking a lot. With many, many moving parts, many of which can affect other parts which might not be broken, trying to update code without making things worse is not easy…I know this from my own professional life, albeit on a much smaller and much simpler scale. I do not envy the CIG developers who are probably (I hope) sweating over finding a fix to this issue; I hope the management is sweating exponentially harder, though, as I will continuously hold them accountable for the broken mess that is Star Citizen.