After a brief sabbatical, I’m back and need to play catch up.

Summer Games Fest

I missed the Summer Games Fest so it’s on my agenda to watch today. I got trickle-down info, so I’m familiar with the broadest of strokes but it’s always the niche stuff that proves to be the most interesting to me.

Guild Wars 3

I woke up at 3:30AM this morning and the first thing I thought was “why am I not more excited about Guild Wars 3?” In fact, since it was announced, I have only been able to muster an “ok” whenever I thought about it.

Many of the responses I’ve seen to the announcement fell into the “but what about GW2?!” bucket, either because people are concerned that GW2 is going into maintenance (it’s not) or, more baffling to me, is how they’re supposed to care about GW2 once GW3 arrives. I find that indecipherable: if you can’t care about anything apart from a whole, or if you are unable to do anything but chase the new shiny then maybe you should seek professional help in that regard.

While I consider GW2 to be in my top 3 favorite MMOs of all time, maybe even the top, I’m kind of ambivalent about another entry in the franchise. I wonder if that’s the answer: it’s another entry in a franchise. MMOs have such long tails that getting another entry a good decade-plus after the release of the last iteration leaves me with an appreciation, but not exhilaration. In another vein, it could be that I’m just not into MMOs now like I was when GW2 released. In another, another vein, I find that my anticipation levels for announced games these days are usually hitting about 2, maybe 3, on a 10-tick scale.

From a purely Guild Wars perspective, I like the world just fine, but I’m also not sure I have it in me to save the world again, this time 1000 years before I have already saved it. That’s a bigger conversation, though, about how we’re always having to be involved in these massive set-piece plotlines where everything is on the line always. Aside from the Searing of Ascalon, things seemed pretty chill in the world back then, but now we will find out that it’s not the case. If I lived on this specific planet, I’d be looking for a way off, considering how often world-wide crisis erupt.

Exodus

Ahead of the eventual release of the Exodus video game, I got the notice that the second book: Exodus: Helium Sea was released yesterday. In the 21st century books have fallen into the Netflix trap of requiring them to be part of a series. I don’t know who takes longer to make, books or TV seasons, but they both suffer from long gaps in between which allows us to completely forget what happened previously on [ENTER NAME OF EVENT HERE].

So before I start reading Helium Sea, I’m going to re-read The Archimedes Engine. Peter F Hamilton is one of those writers who likes to drop in a lot of characters, and whether it’s because of my old age or because I stopped really caring about putting the brain power behind it, I can’t keep them straight even when I’m reading them in a scene. Coming back to the same setting after at least a year and expecting to know who any of these people are or why they’re important is not something I can’t do. I need to start taking notes for books the way I used to take notes on video games when I was younger. Full circle, friends. Full circle.

Jet Lag

Hello from 5AM EDT. As you might be aware, since I was flogging Mastodon with occasional and unrequested updates, I went to Ireland for two weeks. I don’t like to travel, but my wife was hell-bent on this trip so it was either divorce or go to Ireland.

I am now trying to re-adjust to my normal time-zone. The weird thing about Ireland is that even at 9PM it’s about as bright as it is at 6PM here at home. The other problem is that neither my wife nor I are “going out to do stuff at night” kind of people, which meant that after a long day of walking around in overcast-to-torrential-downpour weather, once we get back to our room we were done for the day. That was anywhere between 5PM or 7PM Ireland local time. That translates to 12PM or 1PM our usual time, so yea…my internal clock is way out of whack.

Tonight I will continue to push back my bed time in the hope that my body will just give up and let me sleep. I clocked out at 9:30PM my time last night, and slept well until 3:30AM, so I guess six hours is an OK start. I foresee a nap in my future.

Star Citizen

I bet you missed these updates, huh? Without access to the game, and with limited time to spend kicking around my usual online depots, the only exposure I’ve had to Star Citizen has been through Reddit. I know…I am neither happy nor proud of that. I left r/StarCitizen because it was filled with posts by people who were saying the same things everyone was already thinking like they’re revealing some kind of undiscovered truth only they could possibly comprehend, or people just bitching at CIG or one another. Basically, Reddit in a nutshell.

But I do feel that the backlash over 4.8 is cresting. Backers are usually always pissed off at a low level, emitting their dissatisfaction as a sub-audible hum while they log in and hope that this session will be different. Now, though, CIG’s made too many bad decisions in rapid succession: releasing the patch, radio silence, pushing sales, and apparently, reversing a ban on a well-know cheater because they dropped $5000USD to buy the Odin? I don’t have the details on that last item, but if there’s a sliver of truth to it, it’s really bad optics at a time when CIG is losing the benefit of the doubt from even the whitest of knights.

CIG CTO Benoit is slated to be on Star Citizen Live tomorrow, June 18th, for a two hour chat with Jared. I usually catch those after the fact, but I am going to try like hell to remember to tune in live at 10AM EDT on Twitch because I need to see what he says about the situation in real time. CIG had won a lot of good will in 2025 with their year of progress, but with Squadron 42 supposedly releasing in 2026 (my bets are on 2027 and not just because of Grand Theft Auto VI) it feels like they have diverted resources to getting the single player game out the door, causing Star Citizen to suffer more than it usually does. I could be wrong, but regardless, CIG didn’t just drop the ball for Star Citizen between last year and this one; they drove it cross-country to the edge of the world and punted it into the abyss.