We’re getting closer to the end of the holiday season, which is always both good and bad. This year has had me peopling more than I ever have during this time of year, and it’s been very stressful for me. Thankfully, we only have family Christmas, friend’s New Years party, and our annual Friendsgiving has been pushed out to January to accommodate schedules. Still, I do love this time of year when all of the stressors are stripped away, and I am not looking forward to the new year when all I get here in the Northeast is snow and cold and no “lore” to back it up.

World of Warcraft

So Legion Remix has been a bust for me. I liked the Pandaria Remix and thought that Legion would be more of the same…until I ended up in zones that triggered a visceral, negative response for me. I mean, I wasn’t hell-bent on spending all of my time in LeMix but I did think I’d get much further than I did. Oddly enough, Legion was the first time I had returned to WoW in a bid to give it the lion’s share of my gaming attention. I think that for me, this resulted in a psychic O.D. which, when I landed in Suramar, set me off. I never want to go back there, and the real reason I wanted to do LeMix was because I heard that there would be housing items available for the bronze currency that these remixes offered. There was a problem though: I would have had to have completed a whole lot of achievements in order to unlock the ability to purchase those housing items, and since my WoW career is more half-assed than most asses I’ve given to MMOs over the years, I have zero achievements in Legion. Basically, the whole endeavor was a bust.

Speaking of housing, I have a house, but I haven’t been there since the housing system launched. Housing always sounds like a great idea to me but in practice I never use it. I can’t actually see the point. I’m not into decorating mainly because most housing systems require players to earn decor (see previous paragraph) and I’m never deep enough into an MMO to do that. Otherwise I have to buy it, and making money is never my focus in these kinds of games. I usually end up taking the pity decor, throwing it around a bit, and then never returning to the housing plot.

I am hoping that the neighborhood quests, when they drop, will get me to show up, though. I’m part of a neighborhood of friends, and I don’t want to let them down by just being deadweight, so the least I can do is be a body that helps them achieve the things they want to achieve.

Development Woes

Last week I tried a few new themes for this site. I like the current theme, but it’s very homepage-heavy and if I bothered to look at stats I’m sure I’d probably find that most real people land on specific post pages, and only bots visit the homepage. I tried setting up a single page, lazy-loading theme that just prints entire posts on one page but this is WordPress; the default SPA themes are designed for simplicity and custom design, and every other theme is intended for some bullshit commerce use. I guess the idea of “WordPress as a blogging platform” has fallen by the wayside in this age of video, ceding the field to merchants and buzzword afficionados.

That being the case, I’ve recently been revisiting Astro, the “platform for content” because I don’t know I just work here. I found that when reading the documentation and the small, completely not really usable in the real world tutorial, I was falling asleep. My desire to “do development” is at a all time low, and although I have Ideas(tm) that I would like to work on, I just don’t want to actually do any of it.

Project Falloff

In a similar vein, I’ve been returning to YouTube like someone revisiting their fridge when nothing else is going on in their lives. Maybe it’s the season; maybe I’m just bored of everything. After having started an animation project in Blender, I just…stopped. I feel intimidated by it, feeling that if I can’t get it working Just So(tm) then I’m going to get all sad and not want to work on fixing issues to actually get it Just So(tm).

I’ve also stopped recording gameplay, not that I’ve been playing a lot. It’s been basically Star Citizen and WoW, and there’s not a lot going in Star Citizen that I haven’t already made videos on. I wouldn’t even wield videos of my WoW sessions as a weapon against my worst enemies because boring people to death is considered cruel and unusual punishment. Looking at what I have installed, I keep saying “I need to get back to [Insert installed but untouched game name here]” which includes Dispatch, The Sinking City, and good ole’ Guild Wars 2, in which I had been making really good progress before WoW dropped it’s housing update.

Obligatory Star Citizen Recap

We are awaiting patch 4.5, the Engineering Update, which should be dropping either at the end of this week or, gawd help us and CIG developers, right before Christmas. I jumped into the PTU a few times meaning to test it out, but every time I tried to put myself into a situation where I’d need to actually use engineering, the servers did weird things like not offering me PvE combat missions that I would need to, you know, take damage. I am kind of interested in the stealth inclusion of the VR skunkworks support. Playing Elite Dangerous in VR is a mind-blowing experience so I expect Star Citizen to be as good if not better (mainly because I like Star Citizen better). However, I had issues trying to get my Quest Gen 1 headset recognized by my PC during the time when I was actually testing on the PTU, so I scrapped the idea and will wait until release to take it for a spin.

I am interested to know what the next big update is going to be after 4.5. I suspect 2026 is going to be split between player QOL improvements (inventory revamp, group, and org systems, including org and NPC rep) and “terraforming” which will lead into the final version of mining/refining and then crafting, which itself will lead into homestead creation. These updates will be mortared by continuing updates to what engineering is bringing (ship lifetime, basically), updates to the mission system (which is going to be the most critical part of reaching 1.0, IMO), and hopefully more backlogged ships making it into the game.

Based on what we saw as “1.0” in the CitizenCon presentation, I think we can really get there in the next few years. Tacking on a “few years” to Star Citizen is both headache-inducing, since what’s a few more years at this point, but also kind of exciting after having experienced the painful arc that has brought us to this point. It’s an ambitious game, without a doubt, that was horribly marred by bad stewardship throughout. I will always blame upper management for this game’s protracted woes, and not the rank-and-file developers, artists, and technical people who are trying to make things work. As a person in a technical field, I remember the days of getting excited over the prospect of making an idea work, and I’ve no doubt the CIG developers feel or felt that way, considering some of the tech that has gone or is going into the game. I feel for them, though, as Management has no doubt set a bar at such a height that it could never have been completed in just a handful of years, if at all, and while some concepts have probably been tossed aside as too costly to pursue, CIG developers have done great things to bring the game the technology it does have. Bugs, yes, but again, management is pushing deadlines across more features than any online game has ever had, in ways that no online game has ever provided. We’re still dealing with a “move fast and break things” literal understanding here, even in 2025/2026, but as Squadron’s completion looms closer (we hope), more people can move to Star Citizen, knock out the backlogs and clean up behind the vanguard tech, and hopefully Star Citizen 1.0 can justify it’s protracted development cycle and ludicrous budget…and be an enjoyable experience, too.