Not a lot of bright spots in the past few weeks, and too many dark spots.

EverQuest Legends

I played OG EQ for about a week before I bounced, primarily on account of how group-based it was, how I could never join random people at the time, and how I didn’t know anyone else who played. I do have fond memories of Kelethin, though, logging in and seeing the mist in the tree city. I was also playing Ultima Online at the time so the shift from an iso MMO to a first-person MMO was a massive shock, but aside from the rent-free space that the visual experience occupies in my mind, I don’t have any good memories of OGEQ.

I thought EQL might allow me to touch base with The EverQuest Experience so I bought into the whatever-period-the-game-occupies-right-now (beta?) but it’s been an uphill climb. First, running Wave Link audio router causes the game to crash. Disabling Wave Link (or sound via the EQL launcher) disables sound, but lets the game run. Second, I quickly realized that relying on EQL to provide me with what I missed several decades ago is not going to happen, even on a tangent. A lot of water has passed under the bridge of my MMO experience, and EQL gives me a headache with it’s internal dialect and general throwback-ness. My purchase comes with one month of gameplay, but I’ve only logged in once and am finding it difficult to want to log in again. I think I might chalk this up to the fact that I never learn, and cancel the recurring sub before it recurs.

Arknights Endfield

I’ll be frank: I have grown an intense dislike of anime. I’m not making judgement calls on it as a genre or those who enjoy it; it’s really not something I enjoy in pretty much any incarnation (aside from Ghost in the Shell which somehow speaks to me). My daughter, however, loves it, and so it was with great reticence that I installed Arknights Endfield at her request. There was one scene in the intro she wanted me to see, and it had nothing to do with the game, but I did it anyway.

This is a gatcha game in the same vein as [gestures towards 75% of the gaming releases these days, it seems to me]. Select a male or female character, be mute, gather a rotating roster of mostly scantily clad female characters and ARPG your way through a singular storyline. This one takes place in a corporatocracy, which you know because everything is tagged with the Endfield Corporation name to an almost ridiculous level. In combat there are all kinds of meters which allow for the triggering of combos fired off by other party members and honestly, if you’ve played any gatcha games on the market these days you’ll immediately understand what this game offers.

What you won’t see coming is the industrial gameplay. Somehow, in a bid to stand out, developers Hypergryph/Mountain Contour decided that rather than just make a derivative ARPG, they were going to cram in a heaping dose of Satisfactory. During the exhaustingly extensive tutorial, we learn how to connect power pylons, drop grinders, constructors, conveyor belts, and storage units to hasten Endfield’s corporate destruction of the planet. Here, it’s framed as a good thing, since the player gets the benefit of the constructed goods.

I played for a bit longer than required, but I have no skin in this game, don’t know what’s going on, and really haven’t considered booting into it.

Elite Dangerous

With Star Citizen’s 4.8 patch cycle being a mess, I decided to reinstall Elite Dangerous despite I’m the only person in my usual circle who plays. I found that I had been booted from my private group, too, which adds insult to injury. I also seem to have lost my flight controller bindings, so I haven’t really spent time in the game yet. I’m not entirely sure I will, as Star Citizen’s 4.9 patch — supposedly with a whole bunch of fixes — is already open to all waves on the test servers, signaling an impending release (maybe 2 weeks; certainly by end of July).

Of note, though, is that the most recent release, Operations, adds a LFG instanced dungeon system — like what CIG announced for 4.10 — and a ship with a walkable interior — just like Star Citizen. After No Man’s Sky introduced ship interiors last year, it seems that CIG’s inability to get their shit together has been a boon for other spacefaring games already on the market who are approaching feature-parity with what made Star Citizen such a unique concept…10 years ago.

SKALD: Against the Black Priory

Now for some real news. I have no idea where SKALD came from; it’s an Epic store acquisition and since I’ve been mercilessly trawling back and forth within my digital libraries for weeks now, I spun the wheel, landed on this title, and installed it. And it’s good. It’s very reminiscent of the old 1980’s C64 RPGs I used to play and, thoughtfully, there are settings that allow for Ye Olden CRT Emulation which I find charming and kind of hilarious.

The game starts with one custom made character and over time, the party builds as NPCs are absorbed. Movement is tile based, and combat is turn-based. It’s very much like SSI’s old Gold Box D&D games in terms of vibe, except that the plot is so horrifyingly dark that I doubt SSI would have even tried to field a similar setting back in the 80’s. I’d put it on par with Diablo’s general milleau, with a side-serving of Cuthulu Mythos, real or imagined. The writing and the story are pretty good, which I am happy to see after playing another throwback title, Legends of Amberland II, which went for a more watery, humorous tack that didn’t really land with me despite it’s own nostalgic turn-based, 3D point of view.

GeForce Now

Prior to Arknights Endfield, my kids had gotten back on the Guild Wars 2 train and for Father’s Day they wanted to play with my wife and I. Problem is, we don’t have enough machines to cover everyone. Since GW2 doesn’t run natively on a MacBook, I re-upped to GFN during a sale period, so I could run the game on the Air and not force everyone to be in the basement while I played on my main rig.

I have a good relationship with GFN, stretching back to when my previous PC was getting long in the tooth. Now I see it as a portal that prevents me from having to learn how to screw around with jerry-rigging the MacBook when I want to play a Steam game away from my desk. Thing is, I haven’t really used it much after our GW2 session, so I need to get up and get away more often, or use it rather than install certain titles, so as to justify the purchase. I’m on the yearly plan so I’ll need to evaluate the value in about a year, when the sub renews at it’s normal price.

Star Citizen

I did jump onto the PTU last night to see how things were progressing. @Mindstrike had an issue with his Corsair the other day which was preventing him from leaving the hangar, and that’s a known issue with that ship; I had one on the PTU for some reason, and sure enough, it was still happening so that’s obviously something that still waits for it’s day in the sun. Another issue I wanted to test was the gross desync issues plaguing the newly released Xenothreat event on the public servers. I logged into the test server but was having issues with my Hornet that were not technical, but which took me a while to deal with. The result was that I didn’t get to take a Xenothreat mission, but did end up taking a mission which, I learned as I arrived on-site, required me to board an NPC ship, take out the pirates, repair the damaged components, and escape. Since I had arrived in a combat ship expecting ship combat and not armed nor ready to repair anything, I had to abandon the mission.

4.9 doesn’t look like it’s bringing anything super important in terms of content or features, unless you consider fixes and patches to be important — which I and everyone in the SC community does. Will it be enough? I doubt it. I never is with CIG.

The elephant in the room continues to be Squadron 42. We are told that it will release in 2026, but we haven’t heard of a specific date, nor have we seen any noticeable ramping-up of the marketing for it. The blue whale in the room, of course, is Grand Theft Auto VI which is set to release this fall. Will SQ42 butt-heads with GTAVI? No one on the Squadron/Star Citizen side wants that, so we’re all a bit confused whether the game will release in 2026, ahead, on top of, or behind GTAVI, or whether it will get pushed back to 2027. Many believe that a 2027 fall-back is bad; I think push-backs have become standard for the games industry for whatever reason the studio decides is relevant. Financially for CIG, I don’t know what a push-back would mean but I would be OK if SQ42 didn’t drop until Q1 2027, even though internal community sentiment is still that Squadron is preventing CIG from focusing fully on Star Citizen.

I Hate to Put This Here, But

I can’t but can’t not address Belghast’s passing. Just writing that sentence made my vision swim.

At first I was moved to write something in my long-winded, comma-fascinated style that attempted to do the man justice, but I knew that I would never be able to do that. On one hand, I knew him, but I didn’t know him which is something I have seen a lot of people say in the days after the news broke. Parasocial relationships are weird; some disagree that they’re even a thing but as most of my online social circles will attest in the wake of this news that they absolutely are, and they can be as powerful as lifelong proximate relationships.

On the other hand, Bel was such a cornerstone of the community that I consider myself a part of that not saying something felt conspicuous. I just don’t know what to say nor how to say it. When I got the news on Friday morning I was hit by the first stage of grief. “This is not a thing”; “this is not happening”, but of course it had to be because Bel would never even concept such a ruse on the people I genuinely believe he loved. Then it moved into anger, not the usual “why do good people get taken while bad people continue on?” kind of anger, but a general anger at how unexplainable the Universe can be, and that, because of the nature of online relationships, we’ll never get a full story as to what happened. Then there’s the anger that someone who did so much for so many won’t be able to do such things ever again. There is a hole — an absolutely monumental hole — in our community now, and will be for the foreseeable future.

I am the least of those who could eulogize Bel, but I just wanted to say that I wasn’t avoiding the address of the situation because I felt unaffected. Quite the opposite, and I know I couldn’t write anything that would make me feel like I wasn’t just doing it because it might be expected of me. I just had to make that plain.