Redwolf's Journal (continued)

For kicks, I loaded up GTA Online last night for the first time in months. And... my garage was empty. I don't even recall what cars I had, but I know I had some. Cuuuurses! DLC out today for Dragon Age: Inquisition ? That's kind of a surprise, and something to look into. It reminds me of how DA:I was such a good game littered with indications of unfinished bits that could have made it so much more. WoW is rolling out the groundwork for real currency-purchasable, gold-sellable "tokens" that can be redeemed for time. $20 is a little higher a price point than I would have expected, but I'm far more interested to see how the gold side of things shakes out. Bloodborne releases today and looks pretty good. On the other side, it's a PS4 exclusive, so... no buy for me. Ah well.

While I have access to GW2, WoW, and even FFXIV at the moment, I still found myself casting about for something different to play going into the weekend. In so doing, I came across a Steam-discounted Spec Ops: The Line . There are plenty of reasons I passed over that game when it came out, largely boiling down to "I'm not really that big on shooters," but I've also heard it mentioned as a game with a story that is.... hmm... let's go with remarkable in the sense of being "worthy of remarking upon." And at around $5, that seemed worthwhile. From a mechanical standpoint, it seems to me a decent third-person shooter. I can't say I have a whole lot of experience with the genre, so I can't rate it very seriously, but I think I found more recent Mass Effect games more comfortable and fun to play from that angle alone. It wasn't bad, though. One player and two squadmates versus tons of enemies. There are three branching "choices" that I...

Hmm. It might be time to start looking for new reading material, as I just went through Sworn in Steel over the last few days. Sequel to Among Thieves it continues the tale of Drothe, information-dealer-turned-thief-group-leader after his unplanned rise in status in the first book. This time around, there seems a bit less reliance on chance and dumb luck, and some of the characters actually push the plot forward in a deliberate sense. I consider that a good thing. Characters new and old are still solid. There's a lot of focus on the "Order of Degans" and some explanation as to why they're such hard-to-kill and beyond-normal-capability swordsmen. There's a definite arc to the plot and things certainly happen, though looking back I find Drothe's arc to be... lacking. He starts off as a somewhat reluctant Gray Prince and ends up as... well, a somewhat reluctant Gray Prince. By the end he has some new allies and such that might make his position a bit more ...

Last week I experienced the third wing of Blackrock Foundry for the first time. The third boss fight there, with the Iron Maidens, took a little coordination, but we got through it after a few times. My impression at the time was, "That seemed kind of long. I could totally see the LFR version being adjusted, at least." Doing it again this week, I didn't go over to the ship and that only reinforced my opinion. There are some interesting mechanics, and I like sending a team over to the ship to stop the bombardment, but especially for those that stay on the dock, the first 80% of the fight is kind of a long, boring slog. Oh, there are things to dodge at some points, but there's a large amount of time spent just going through rotation and maybe switching targets - it's pretty dull. So I'm not at all surprised by the recent changes that reduce boss health (and thus encounter length). That's pretty much exactly what I thought the encounter needed.

I recently finished The Providence of Fire, sequel to The Emperor's Blades. In this second book, things fly off the rails all the more. Heh. The biggest thing that comes to mind is it makes the series into a shining example of unreliable narration (something I sort of like to see, opposed to the fantasy prophecy trope, but it sure makes things confusing sometimes). In the first book, some "secrets" of the world come out. There's an all-but-forgotten race of pre-humans who waged a war of extermination but largely lost, yet they still seem to have some agents working in the world. The emperor knew this, and that's why his eldest son was trained as a monk to attain the mental discipline to use a network of those precursors' magic gates that can traverse great distances. These beings are portrayed as cold, calculating, manipulative, and emotionless - horrible enemies who must be killed all all cost because they won't stop until humans are all gone. In the...

Technically, it may not be for a few days yet, but the weekend has been t-shirt weather and I've started needed allergy meds, so it feels like it to me...

Well, let's see... Offline roleplaying has been stalled since our regular GM left town. I don't really have any expectation of that changing in the foreseeable future - folks have plenty of other things to do these days. Online roleplaying is still fairly limited to small groups, though I'd say I've been in more scenes of late than just a month or so ago. The online Lords of Gossamer and Shadow game has been sort of hit-and-miss as far as attendance. In theory, characters were supposed to be able to slip in and out as players were busy or not, but in practice... eh... that just doesn't work so well, at least in my view. I think my interests lean toward 1) action and accomplishment (the doing of things and overcoming of challenges) and 2) interplay and development between characters. The latter is unavoidably hamstrung when you don't get a solid "party" together for any length of time (or when people don't play to that and their characters are j...