Well, recording the Final Fantasy 14 wrestling match (primarily for my friend who is out of town but also for one of the performers who asked for access to the videos when I spoke with him about getting permission to record) went so well that I’ve become the unofficial videographer of the group now. The wrestler shared it with the rest of the group and they all loved it so much that I offered to keep recording the events for them, sharing the videos via a throwaway gmail account I have. I was clear that I wasn’tmaking a commitment to record every single event since I’m sure there will eventually be some I can’t attend and I’m not going to let this game get in the way of my non-digital life, but I plan to attend each event as long as it’s my choice and I’ve got the ability to record them relatively easily so I might as well. It was a relatively easy process, after all. I spent some time earlier today (I’m writing this on the day of the wrestling match while I wait for the videos to finish converting and then upload) messing around with my settings so I could get the best possible mixture of recording quality and file size. I chopped the entire event into smaller pieces, too, so that people wouldn’t be stuck watching a four-hour video and could instead focus on individual matches or how the pre and post match banter or events looked. I even titled and numbered them so that it would be legible to anyone what was going on. It wasn’t a lot of work, mind you. It took about thirty minutes to configure my setup–which I used for streaming back in the day–by messing with settings, recording stuff for a minute or two, checking the output, and then tweaking more stuff, but now I’ve got that set up and all I’ve got to do from now on is manage the recording software, process the final videos, and then upload them to my gdrive for my throwaway email account. Easy-peasy.
Continue readingVideo Gaming
Taking A Day Off Final Fantasy 14 Against My Will
I might have a small problem. I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV and while I haven’t lost control of my life, I’m still showing up for work, and I’m still attending to all my responsibilities, I am also absolutely at a loss for what to do with myself tonight (the day I’m writing this) while the game is down for its next major update (going from version 7.1 to 7.2). I mean, I’ve got stuff I could be doing and that I probably will wind up doing once I’m done here, but I am absolutely feeling adrift as I think about the fact that I can’t just keep playing FFXIV with all of my free time. Aside from a few planned breaks here or there, largely intended to take care of specific tasks or watch some Hunter x Hunter to prepare for the next episode of Media Club Plus, I haven’t taken a night off of playing Final Fantasy 14. I certainly haven’t avoided playing it any time I’ve WANTED to play it. Until tonight. Tonight, I’ve had to refocus myself multiple times as my mind has wandered off to think about what I’d like to do in the game. It’s been annoying. Minorly annoying, sure, but annoying all the same. It makes sense the game would need to be down for maintenance in order for them to update all the servers and everything (that’s a pretty monumental undertaking), but I still feel modestly frustrated by it as I’ve had to think about what to start spending my time on instead. I mean, I haven’t really started ANYTHING since I began playing Final Fantasy 14, other than Slay the Princess. Closest I’ve come aside from that was playing a bit over an hour of Wanderstop and I had to stop that because it was going to make it more difficult to keep myself working. Which, you know, is a pretty moot point right now given that I’ve taken the rest of the week (as of me writing this) off.
Continue readingFinding The Online Community I’ve Always Wanted in Final Fantasy 14
Last weekend (as of this post going live) was incredibly eventful for my little group in Final Fantasy 14. As I’ve been playing more and more over the last few months, I’ve gotten to know more and more of my Free Company (or guild, for those of you more familiar with other Massively Multiplayer Online games) as they’ve made me gear, helped me with quests, I’ve done work with/for them, and we’ve just hung out together. It’s been really nice, finding a community, learning people’s names, occasionally hanging out in voice chat, and just really digging into the social aspect of the game beyond running into random people around here (many of whom are very nice and not at all creepy: one of them gave me some free stuff the other day while I was working on a project near a market). Because of that and being a very active and friendly member of the tight-knit group, I’ve been getting involved in more and more stuff as time has gone on. I’ve always been a regular at the group’s wrestling outings, but I’ve done what I can to try to attend every single group event so that I can become a bit more emmeshed in the group before my friends, the couple who got me into the game at this particular moment in time, disappear for their delayed honeymoon. All of which amounts to me attending three roleplaying events with the group in a twenty-four hour period from Friday night to Saturday night. They were all a lot of fun, but that was a lot of socializing via text and, for part of it, voice chat, which left me drained. I don’t regret my choices, but I do wish I had a bit more of a social battery these days.
Continue readingLots Of Side Progress In Final Fantasy 14
I haven’t really posted much about Final Fantasy in the last two weeks, since my post about Capitalism finally getting me in Final Fantasy 14. I wrote about it tangentially a week ago, but that was mostly in the context of working a long day from home, but I haven’t really written about the game and its story. Mostly because I wound up letting myself get incredibly side-tracked over the past few weeks–long enough that I’m not exactly sure how long it has been. Instead of focusing on the MSQ (Main Scenario Quests), I’ve been working on a bunch of side-content and leveling up my skill-based jobs. I helped rebuild a city that was actually rebuilt years ago (the costs of running through old game content years after it was released), helped a bunch of people settle into a post-war life, visited a fantastical floating island chain that provides a specific type of resources used only in building and maintaining the aforementioned rebuilt city, and used the bonuses from that to drastically boost my own abilities. I also attended another Roleplaying Wrestling event, did a “Savage” raid, wrapped up a tiny bit of the MSQ so I could start the next expansion, and built myself an entire set of crafting gear so I could say I’d done it. As you can see, it’s not like I’ve stopped playing the game. Even when I deviated from this to play other games (more on that next week), I used the nights I’d normally take off from the game to do that. I have stopped spending as much time on capitalistic gain, though, just because I don’t really have anything to spend the money on yet and have been trying to use my evenings a bit more specifically.
Continue readingGiving In To Capitalism In Final Fantasy 14
A couple weekends back, thanks to a day with little else going on, I managed to make a million gil (the currency in Final Fantasy XIV) in a single day’s collection. It was quite a prosperous undertaking and still left me with decent chunks of the day to do other stuff. A lot of collecting is done on a timer, with the various collection nodes (minerals for rocks and ore and trees or bushes for wood and vegetation) for high-level materials showing up at specific times every day. So, for the day, I set some alarms that our guild’s leader wrote out for us and teleported around the map to hit up every single possible node. There was one more that I lack the ability to visit, since it is locked behind progressing the Main Scenario, but I still made out like a bandit thanks to my guild leader setting me up with a solid set of gear. A lot of the higher-tier gathering is based on your gear rather than your levels or abilities, so going from a scattered set of decent gear meant for level fifty to a stellar set of gear meant for level sixty was a HUGE boon and going from a mishmash of what I had laying around to actually good level fifty gear for my other gathering class was a game changer. That change alone made me so much money, and my guild leader did it all for free (on top of buying all the stuff to use for his own projects or pass on to the buyer who has hired the guild to collect these resources).
Continue readingI Made It Through My First Final Fantasy XIV Expansion
Fairly recently (a week and a half ago, as of this going up, since I apparently finish major story segments of the game on Monday or Tuesday), I finally finished the Main Scenario Quests for the central chunk of the first major expansion of Final Fantasy XIV. This one, called “Heavensward” or 3.0, depending on if you’re into titles or major version numbers, features a section of the world that went largely ignored in the original part of the game (A Realm Reborn) because of its policies of isolation. This place, Ishgard, is a society located within a cold and dreary chunk of the world that withdrew into its major city (and surrounding defenses) as the thousand-year-long dragon war began to escalate around the same time the invasion of the surrounding area started ramping up. Following the end of the “patch content” between the end of A Realm Reborn and the start of Heavensward, you’re granted entry into this isolated city, adopted by one of the major houses (metaphorically, I mean, not legally), and then thrown into the societal problems facing this country like a Holy Hand Grenade from the Worms games. As is right and proper for the protagonist of a video game, you crash into a thousand years of lies, an ancient betrayal, and shine the light of true on the world shebang like you’re a nightlight in a dark hallway. And, you know, meet some memorable characters along the way.
Continue readingSuper Smash Bros. Nostalgia
I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. for decades. More than two and a half, if I recall correctly. I was not a terribly athletic child, so my hand-eye coordination wasn’t good and I wasn’t terribly skilled at video games because I just couldn’t get my brain to get past needing to think about which buttons to press and how to manipulate the joystick with everything I did. This meant I was pretty terrible at the game even though it was built on an incredibly simple if frequent combination of button presses and joystick manipulation. It was always a battle against myself to even be able to play it, let alone battle my more-skilled friends and elder sibling, and it was a battle I frequently lost with not just this game but ANY game that required even rudimentary simultaneously activation of buttons and a joystick. I just couldn’t get my brain and body to do two different things at the same time (I was never able to rub my stomach and pat my head at the same time, which was at least my childhood’s measurement of how coordinated you were compared to your friends). It was frustrating, to know what I needed to do to be able to compete and to be unable to do it, made even more so by the ease with which my brother beat me and the way he’d lord his superior skills over me because it was yet another thing he was better than me at. Not that I ever had much of a chance, mind you, given that I only ever got to practice while playing against him or some of our neighborhood friends thanks to how limited my video game time was.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy XIV: One Week After Buying The Full Game
Last time, I wrote about my impressions of the general plot of the first major chunk of Final Fantasy XIV and my thoughts about buying the game. Now that I’ve own the game for a full week, gotten in a solid weekend of play, and had a few more days besides, I’ve gotten a much better impression of the gameplay loop that I’ll be experiencing for a significant portion of the future. At this point, now that I’ve joined up with the Free Company my friends are in, gotten a few more jobs up to the post-level-50 zone, and started to dig into the more modern day-to-day stuff, I feel like I’m on firm enough ground to say that I’ll probably be playing this game for years to come. I’m sure I’ll take months off, cancel my subscription from time to time, and eventually play other stuff when I get tired of FFXIV or run out of interesting things to do (or just get tired of sitting in my office all the time), but I can see myself playing this game for quite a while yet. The whole “daily events, do some gathering, meet up with friends, and idly pursue quests or rare drops” loop is really working for me here, likely because so much of it is social or something I can (and probably should!) be doing with other players. I’m still new to the FC, but everyone has been so warm and welcoming that I’m sure I’ll get over my initial shyness really soon and start reaching out to them for help or to do some of my daily/weekly events. I’m just really feeling new right now and that’s a difficult place for me to ask for help from, especially when I know I could probably figure it out by myself.
Continue readingWrapping Up Part 1 of Final Fantasy XIV
There won’t be any direct spoilers for the final plot points of Final Fantasy XIV’s A Realm Reborn in here, but I’ll be gesturing at it broadly. It’s not a surprising twist or anything, but I felt I should at least disclaim that, even if I’m writing about stuff nearly a decade old at this point. After all, I just started playing the game and would have wanted to avoid spoilers, so maybe you would too. Anyway, skip paragraph three if you want to avoid spoilers (this is paragraph 1).
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 32
I’ve been thinking about the stories that video games tell, the ones you find within them, and the way that some games lack any kind of storytelling in favor of simulating a person’s ability to choose to do whatever they want. All of these kinds of games have their own places in the broad field that is “video games,” but I was preparing myself to write about why I prefer games with stories to tell and had to set that blog post aside because I’m too worn down by life and everything to really get my thoughts together like that. I figured I’d write a Tired and Sad post instead and realized, as I dug around for a topic, that the game I’ve maybe written the most about is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Which prompted the thought that maybe I prefer emergent storytelling since that game has almost no story to tell you. Not because you have the ability to choose things (well, you’ve got the ability to choose to do them or not, which is maybe the easiest choice to give to players), but because the whole game is so focused on creating little nuggets of story that only emerge as you play and explore and find them for yourself.
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