Since I had gotten burnt out on the CitizenCon posts I haven’t even considered “content creation” over the past week or two. Instead, I’ve been trying to find a groove because we’re getting into that time of year when the light changes, the weather gets colder (…eventually), and everything seems smaller and more claustrophobic. Also, all of the impending election bullshit. It’s not a good Mental Health period.

Development

I have recently been having a very difficult time wanting to continue my journey as a developer. I realized that I have absolutely no content of my own to display, and not that there’s any writing on any walls or anything but were I to lose my job I’d have nothing public I could point to as an example of my skill-set. All of my current work is intranet-based, so I had been trying to come up with personal projects that I could work on and actually finish not just to do but to have in the event I needed a portfolio.

Sadly, I’ve gotten to a point where every time I sit down to consider continuing a project or learning something development-related, I open all the tools (Obsidian, browser, VSC, etc.) for a few seconds and then close them all again. I can’t seem to muster the interest in spending All The Time to just get a minimally viable product working, and for those projects I had been working on, I can’t muster the interest in going back to them and relearning where I had left off.

Bloomtown

I’m also behind on my Bloomtown play-through video series. Part of the issue was that I went away for a week’s vacation. Part of the issue is the current malaise. Part of the issue is that as a game, Bloomtown is pretty good, IMO, but as a watchable feast it’s not got a whole lot going for it. I realized that the place where I am at in the game right now is almost all about combat, and that can take a while; I get tired of those segments, so I can’t imagine they’re terribly fun for people to watch. Since I believe that, I’ve kind of been avoiding the game and the video series.

This is my typical project cycle, as the amount of work I had set up for myself for the series — with the intros, building the recap segment, recording, editing, and futzing around with the video — was A Lot In A Short Amount of Time, and now I’m feeling the “project overload” that causes me to distance myself from it for an as-of-yet-unknown amount of time.

Nightingale

Poor Nightingale. Developers Inflexion recently laid off an entire division of their studio, closing their UK branch to boot. I’d like to just chalk this up to the same noxious cloud that’s enveloped the games industry (and other industries, really) as a whole, but I also feel that Nightingale hasn’t gotten the traction that it needs to walk the path it has set itself on.

Early access can be a blessing or a curse, because some games seem able to ride it successfully to a release while others hopefully adopt the practice but seem to struggle. Personally — and I’m not normally this pessimistic — I feel that Nightingale is an example of the latter. I simply don’t think it has the level of mind-share that a game needs during a period when it needs to be funded; say what you want about Star Citizen, but they found a way to keep momentum on that cash-flow over 10 years. Not all companies can be that lucky for even a fraction of that time, sadly. Maybe we’re over-inundated with games, or maybe some games simply don’t resonate with as many people as their financial needs require them to.

Mechwarrior 5: Clans

I had sworn that I wouldn’t buy this early on because I liked MW5: Mercenaries well enough and had a love-hate relationship with MW: Online. I was waiting for the Dapper Dusty Monk’s thoughts on the matter (and he has provided them in spades), but said “oh, what the hell” and bought into the game before he launched his videos.

I am not displeased with this entry into the long-running franchise; out of all of Piranha’s BattleTech content, I like this one the best. I have been a BattleTech fan since the original release, although I really disliked the introduction of the Clans as I felt it complete negated the “twilight of humanity” that the Inner Sphere was driving themselves toward and made the setting just a generic “big robot forever war”. But MW5: Clans, with it’s single-player story and NPC party, is easier to get into than Mercs or Online. I agree with Dusty that the “normal” setting can get overly difficult, but I think developer Piranha’s mindset on gaming skews towards the “git gud” mentality fostered by the competitive nature of MW:O, so I am playing on “story” mode and have no ragrets.

Wayfinder

In brighter news, I cobbled together some bucks and picked up Wayfinder a few days ago. Both the Esteemed Belghast and the Mega-Brains over at MassivelyOP seemed to like it, and because my response to the icks is often to buy stuff, I decided on this one and I have yet to be disappointed…except for one significant factor.

I won’t explain the game since Bel does a very good job of it, and because I’m not terribly far in the game to be able to speak to it well enough, but while it’s a good drop-in-drop-out game, after running around in-world for a while I am very sad that this is actually an MMO-That-Wasn’t because it’s got the Very Big MMO Vibes about it. The art style is great, the action feels good, and it looks like a whole lot of the game world was built for an MMO but now feels overwhelmingly abandoned in just a single player/co-op title. Don’t let that put you off on the game, though: it’s fun, deep, and easy to play for short bouts of time.

Star Citizen

And this sad, sad train rolls on.

Server meshing, the “make it or break it” feature that was on deck for 4.0 is apparently causing a massive ruckus on the public test universe…so much so that CIG has pushed back almost all of the other systems that were meant to also be in the 4.0 release: engineering, fire and suppression, life support on ships, charge-and-drain (for repairs and powering things up), and a very important transit system refactor. CR has mandated that 4.0 be out before the end of the year, so taking some of those items off the table and keeping them for a 4.x release should hopefully get more hands on meshing to solve the issues to keep that promise, I guess.

But fear not, for filling the hole left by all of those delayed systems we have…more ships for sale in the intermediate 3.24 patch! This isn’t really a surprise as the calendar says that 3.24 should be the IAE patch, and we all knew that there would be new ships for sale during that event.

On the one hand, this seems like it could be 3.18 all over again — the Patch That Broke The World. On the other hand, CIG obviously knows this and is doing what they believe they can do in order to avoid making the alpha completely unplayable at the end of the year. CIG has a habit of taking long end-of-year breaks, and if they released 4.0 with all the bells and whistles and then vanished over the Holidays while the game burns…well, considering the circumstances surrounding the game at this moment, both from without and within, Star Citizen would certainly and finally crash and burn. To be honest, that isn’t entirely off the table, which is why I believe that this change in the release schedule — and all other actions from CIG going forward — are going to need to be carefully considered less for their impact on the studio and it’s bottom line, and more on the impact on the company’s and the game’s public image.