Category: Coffee Break

Which isnt that great, to be honest. There’s no use of having a website that costs money, if I’m not going to use it. That’s hopefully going to change soon, but.. We’ll see.

I did end up getting into the D4 beta – I’m not going to say I played the closed beta in November, because if I did it would consitute a breach in the NDA – but I’m allowed to say whether or not I played the open beta; which I did. I played both a Sorcerer, Rogue, and a Necromancer, got all of them to the max level. It was glorious.

There’s a new beta coming along this weekend, and I’ll be playing that one too. Last beta, if you got to level 20, you could get two titles and a back cosmetic item (I’ll drop the image down below), and this beta offers the same rewards, with one additional one; If you kill Ashava, the world boss, with a level 20 character, you earn the “Cry of Ashava Mount Trophy”, which is something you can hang on your mount. I’m dropping that image down below as well. Atleast this beta, Ashava will spawn on a fairly regular interval, which will start between 9 am PDT May 13th, and every third hour until 9 am PDT May 14th. Atleast that gives us good time to actually kill it – last beta I only got to kill it once because of scheduling at home, I simply didnt have time to play when the world boss appeared the other times.

Speaking of Diablo 4, by the way, I actually did end up buying the game. Twice. One for PC and one for PS5 – this way, I’m able to play the game more “seriously” when I’m at the PC, and I can play some melee characters more relaxed infront of the TV.

But enough of Diablo 4 for now. I’ll fill in more of the game as the time comes – especially during the next beta. Or when I play it as it launch in less than a month now! It launches June 6th!

As for other news, I’ve begun collecting some childhood memories! Mainly tabletop rpg-stuff, and finally after loads of time and – for me – an obscene amount of money, I’ve managed to collect the entire “base set” of stuff I was out to get – the complete published collection of the settings and campaign books of the edition I wanted! Now I just need the editions before and after this one..

Unfortunately, I’m not going to post a photo of it.
What I can say, is that the same tabletop rpg-publisher also published an entire fantasy book collection – 51 books – which I have begun collecting as well, and as of now, I own 36 of said books. The books I now search for are mostly about Conan, 10 books, and it’s proven difficult to find some of them. I did find someone who sold all ten of them, but he wants $250 for them..unless someone offers more, in which case, I have to bid more for them.

Look, I want to complete the set as much as the next guy, but for me to fork over that much in one go, I have to plan my budget a lot more, and save up money for a while for it to not hurt too much in one go. And this month is definitely not one of those, sadly. And even then, I still have the published adventures of the edition I’m collecting to buy – all in all, there’s just too much money pouring out of my wallet for me to actually pursue this 10-book collection of Conan for now.

At the same time, I’ve also begun buying miniatures to have around in my shelves. The excuse is that I might end up using them in some tabletop sessions, but honestly, I might not even get a session going at all. I want to, and the plan is for me to be a Game Master for a homebrew campaign with my oldest kid – potentially also my younger kids when they get older – and their mom. Perhaps someone else as well, who knows. But knowing myself, it might actually end up being either scrapped or tuned down to something not requiring miniatures, in which case, I’ll only end up with a shelf full of pretty minis – which isnt such a bad thing, really.

I got a couple of 3d-printed minis, and while they’re “cheap” to get in volume compared to some plastic minis that, say, Games Workshop sells, they’re also harder to work with I realized. Plastic glue doesnt take well on them, so if something breaks off I cant glue it in place with the plastic glue I had. I had to buy UV-glue and a small UV-light in order to glue those things, and it always tend to leave a small “bulge” around the glued area. Not super huge, but it is minis we’re talking about, so relatively, it’s huge. Also, I know I’m a newbie about this, but spray-priming it seems to just give a weird coating, like a thick coating instead of the thin layer I expected. So, while cheaper, and arguably a lot more costumizable due to it being print-on-demand for whatever thing you’ve got designed, the down side being that it’s harder to glue and prime, and honestly, it feels more brittle.

Ofcourse, I can do this comparison, even if it’s not universally true or in line with others experiences, because I also bought plastic injection molded minis, and wow.. the difference is huge! In my experience, priming it was a lot smoother, because it didnt get that thick layer, it was like the plastic just accepted a thin layer of paint, while the 3d printed resin stuff let the paint “pool” on the surface, requiring more priming to get a complete coverage. I dont know if that is what happened, but it felt like it. Also, while I have used UV-glue on the plastic miniatures – and it did work fine – I also used actual plastic glue and… well, it didnt “set” as fast as using UV-glue and a UV-light does, when it eventually does set, it’s really stick those pieces tight! I bought a Be’lakor and used the plastic glue on the wings, and despite the entire thing being as large and comparatively heavy as it is, I can actually lift it in the wings and not risk breaking the wing off!

Admittedly, I havent painted any of the plastic models yet, save for priming them, but I have high hopes. Priming the 3d printed stuff got some details obscured, like the faces – while not perfectly detailed faces from the start, it got almost lumpy in comparison with primer paint on it – but the plastic models turned out great. I can still see the small chain pattern on the loincloth of my Be’lakor with ease, and the faces of my plastic skeletons and Nighthaunt ghosts are definitely well detailed still.

I even got a couple of buildings – 3d printed ones – for fairly cheap. They weren’t actually cheap, since I paid over $170 for them, but considering they would’ve cost about $300 otherwise, you could pretend they’re cheap. My youngest son has already called dibs on one of them as a play-house, which was not really something I intended, but I have already resigned to that. I’ve got a photo somewhere of it semi-built, but before he gets to play with it for real, I’ll have to fit some pieces together better, glue them, use some greenstuff to fill in some gaps, prime it, paint it.. And my oldest called dibs on “any of the houses”, so I gave him the smallest to paint – I only need to fill in gaps there as well, and prime it before he can paint it. Now, my middle kid has asked for a building to call his own as well, but I’m not sure what to do about it. My oldest is fine with the smallest house, and sure, my youngest kid claimed the absolutely largest house for his, but two of the remaining houses are much to fragile to give him, and the third house is way too small – still larger than the house my oldest got, but compared to the house my youngest claimed, it’s tiny; which is almost certain to cause friction between the two.

I just need to get around to fix these up, paint them.. and who knows, maybe I’ll succeed in fixing the tower up and give it to my middle kid. While still fragile, I hope he can manage to fit the floors on top of each other if I just fix the “dowels” better, but the tavern.. each of the floors consists of several pieces, and lifting and dropping it will almost certainly break it apart. That one is too fragile, almost too fragile for myself.

But I ended up noticing a few things during my first steps into my new-found hobby.

The first being that I do not like priming with a spray-can. I quickly got onto the GW website to look around for priming paint I could dab on with a brush, and I was actually pleasantly surprised when I was told through the chat system, that the Citadel “base” paints would actually work like primer as well! I had a bunch of those at home already, so I can do that easily from now on with the rest of any miniatures I buy. I still think I’ll keep spray-priming any large stuff I have or get, until that spray-can is empty atleast.

The second is that I understand how important a proper workplace is. I painted 11 miniatures sitting under a bad ceiling light, on my sofa with my low coffee table as a work area, and the back and neckpain is still haunting me, almost a week later. The next set of miniatures, I painted on my PC desk, next to my large windows that lets in lots of natural lights. While better, it was still not enough – I need larger work area and better spot-lighting that I can control better, as well a better height for my work area. Being an old goldsmith, I’m used to having the bench pin at almost eye-height, as I used the filings-drawer as a place to rest my arms. Which means that even if I’m seated at my desk, I want the minis propped up at eye level, which is almost a feet and a half above the actual desk surface. These took a total of 16h to do, and it almost killed my back and neck to do them.

Thirdly, I also realized that this is actually fun as all hell, and that even if I’m not digging the spray-can, I might actually get myself an airbrush. It’ll be the first I ever use one, and the upkeep of it is dreading me. But, getting a cheap one for $200 might be a good thing, since most of the paint I already own are useable with an airbrush anyway, the only thing I need to get – besides the airbrush itself – is some sort of cleaning kit. The airbrush I’m currently looking at does include both the gun, a compressor and the hose, two basic colours, paint diluting, cleaning liquid, two glass jars, and two pipettes. While it seems like good value, I think I’m going to need more cleaning eventually so as to not completely destroy my airbrush – and that’s not mentioning some sort of air-ventilated booth of some kind.

Oh, the reason I think of getting myself an airbrush, is because I somehow ended up kickstart-backing a 280+ miniature – plus bits, like almost 100 bits which is mostly weapons – from Archon Studios, which is one of the largest plastic injection molding miniature manufactorer there is, apparently. They’ve mostly done terrain before, with a few miniatures as well, but this time they’ve gone all out in doing miniatures only. And it does look sweet.

Unfortunately, those wont come until next year. By then, I hope I’ll have a good portion of my shelves filled with miniatures and a bunch of painting experience behind my belt, as well as a proper setup to work at.

And having looked at some Youtube videos about painting, especially Lyla Mev, Whyloch’s Armory and WatchItPaintIt, I’ve decided to try to get ahold of some Speed Paints. From what I can tell of these videos, speed painting seems like it’s more up my alley – as fun as painting is, I’m too impatient and shaky on my hands to do it “good” anyway, might as well do it fast with paint that is meant to paint fast with. Apparently, these $200+ paints are supposedly really good and are now on my shopping list – but that will unfortunately take a while… Oh, right – a paint-shaker is on it too, because my wrists are not up to the task of shaking paint..

I’m stoked for the D4 release! I did see some leaks from the game – not sure if they’re hacked-and-released, or if they’re “leaked teasers”, but it doesnt really matter. It’s obviously still in development, that much is clear, but from what we’ve seen it’s pretty damn neat! They dont have voice actors yet, so there’s that auto-voice for every dialogue and that’s pretty hilarious to be honest.

Soon there will be a Beta test going on, and hopefully I get in. It’s obviously under NDA, so if I will get in, or what I’ll do, or any thoughts I have on the game, I wont be able to say, but.. here’s to hoping.

I’ve been told it’s far closer to D2 than D3 in its style though, so I thought I’d play some D2. I’ve never have – I never got the game when it was released or the years after, but I did get the classic game through Blizzard a few years ago and tried it out, but it didnt work. It was clunky, crashed often, I couldnt get anything going. I basically only went outside the camp, found a cave and that’s the extent of my playtime. So, a week or so ago, I bought the game – the remake, D2R – on PS5 on sale. Pretty neat, worked fairly well with a controller. I made a paladin and got to level 3 and I was pretty happy with the game. I could definitely see how people loved this game back in the day! Then I found out that D2R even had cross save! Meaning, anything I did on the PS5 carried over to the game if I had it on the PC, etc, and I just jumped on the Blizz-app to get the game on PC too. Now I’m a level 13 Paladin with a SWEET setup so far!

I’ve got a scepter and a shield for my main damage and a crossbow as a backup. So far I never had to use the crossbow, so I dont know if that’s “wasted space” or not though. The scepter I got was something I found at level 5, and it’s still the best weapon I’ve found! It was a level 6 requirement, meaning I couldnt use it when I found it, BUT! There’s a skill I decided upon leveling with, Holy Bolt, which is a level 6 required spell – and the scepter had bonuses that is just too good! As an auto-attack thing, it does 6-11 damage, with a 1-3 fire damage added, it does +50% to undeads, which what I use for Holy Bolt anyway – but not only that, it had +3 Holy Bolt! Meaning, when I reached level 6, I used my skillpoint to get Holy Bolt level 1, just to equip the scepter and run around using Holy Bolt level 4! I had to be level 10 to get that levelled up to 4, but now I got it at level 6!

I imagine I need to switch out this scepter soon, but as long as this scepter will carry me, I’ll stick with it. I do contemplate on selling my crossbow to find a better weapon. This scepter and shield is really good for fighting undeads, but I think I need a better melee weapon to fight other things, like beasts.

The shield isnt too bad either – it has a 16 defence in itself, 50% block chance, +25% enhanced defences, and between 10 and 15% extra elemental defences, as well as 1 point thorn damage and even self-repair of 1 per 33 seconds! I feel like I really lucked out with my paladin for this early game!

Oh – and I’m at the Monastery so far. It’s actually a lot more fun game than I thought it would be!

So, art creation ended after a month. It was fun while it lasted, but in all honesty, I felt it was a bit too pricey for what I got out of it. I did get a couple of nice arts that I get to keep though, so that’s something.

I’ve taken up Diablo 3 again, been playing just over a week now. I got through the entire Season 27 Journey, so now I have the double portrait borders, the new pet, a stash tab.. all around, pretty good! I think it’s a decent season to be honest, basically “Primal’ing” any item at will, with a bonus power added to it. Drawback is that they roll three random extra powers, so if you dont get the power you’d like, it’s basically like playing with a primal – oh, and you can only play with one such item equipped.

For now, I’ve managed to get a couple of builds together; Sentry Marauder, Strafe Impale, Strafe Multishot, a Speed Multishot and Wudijo’s Natalyas Rapidfire – those just on Demon Hunter. I also got the Tal Rasha Meteor, Firebird Explosive Blast, Vyr Archo- and DMO Frozen- Arcane Orb, Typhon Hydra, the LoD Meteor, and a weird creation of my own which uses Firebird Disintegrate/Magic Missile on Wizard. All I do on that build is stand still and channel Disintegrate, constantly teleporting around, CC immune thanks to Invigorating Gemstone and when I’ve ticked everything with ignite I just send out a massive wave of firebased Magic Missiles. It’s not terribly strong, but I did do a GR104 with it.
..in 13 minutes.. I’m trying to get a Fragement of Destiny sanctified with Magic Missile power, so that I can do the “actual” Firebird Magic Missile, with Explosive Blast, Black Hole and Frost Nova build, but so far, luck hasn’t been on my side when it comes to rolling wands or powers..

Besides those two classes, the Demon Hunter and Wizard, I’m also trying to get a Witch Doctor going. I’m missing a key component when it comes to the Zunimassa Poison Dart, which is the Dagger of Darts. I just cant seem to get my hands on one. Ofcourse, I’m not only trying to get that build going, but also a speed-build that BigDaddyDen showed a couple of days ago, but I need three pieces of Mundungos for that – still trying to get shoulders, chest and pants. Weirdly, I’m probably closer to get those three, than I am the Dagger of Darts..
Oh, and ofcourse, trying to gamble this with Kadala has actually gotten me closer to get a full Arachyr build than anything. I’m missing head, chest and a ring, I believe. Which isnt to say it’s bad – although ranked as an A tier build and not an S tier, it’s there along with the other two builds the Witch Doctor has. I’m just wondering if I, as an arachnophobiac, will be able to play the build… with that massive spider and jars of spiders you’re throwing…

And who can forget the Crusaider. LoD Bombardment is the one I’m going for, but I havent even levelled the Crusaider up to 70 yet.

Other than that… Well, this week I’ve been diving head first into Diablo 3. I havent done much else, to be honest. I’m recovering from an incessant cold, mostly. I rearranged my furnitures, alone, when the kids were at their moms, and that took a heavy toll on me. Couple that with the fact that, apparently, my youngest kid had contracted a cold from kindergarten and had come up to sleep next to me every night that week, and my rearrangement of furniture apparently broke me. It’s been two weeks since, and I’m still coughing. I’ve taken tests and, no, it’s not that. It’s an actual cold.

So, a bit of news on D4 though – It’s set to come out next year, which is awesome! It’s MMO-esque, and not an ARPG like D3, so I imagine it’s like “WoW in Sanctuary”, which is ok with me. There’s also a beta coming out soon, I imagine it’s for select people only, but that beta is apparently for the entire game, start to finish. Oh, to be one of the chosen ones! It’s also no pay-to-win involved at all, according to what I heard, so I consider D4 officially redeemed from the DI-fiasco.

In other ARPG-news, Path of Exile had a terrible new league. The league mechanic itself bugged out alot apparently, I heard lots of people making T16-mirrors that gave basically nothing, and they had tuned both quantity and quality of item drops throughout the game – as well as overtuned “item culling”, scaled up mob health and nerfed mob-juicing.
Perhaps this doesnt make much sense to most, but basically, when you play the endgame content of PoE, you open up a map; there’s 6 portals to the new destination, you enter and kill as many enemies as possible. Before, the loot-system worked in a different way, every enemy had a set chance to drop stuff, chosen from a loot table. Both quantity and quality – amount and how rare each item was – came from that chart, and most mobs could drop several items each. Alot of it was “currency” – which in PoE is items used for crafting purposes, there are no actual currency like gold – but plenty of it was just items. Most were “rare”, yellow quality, which meant that if you played your card right when crafting with that item as a base, you could get lucky and get an item-upgrade from what you had, making you more powerful.
Now, both quantity and quality were tuned down – meaning, less items dropped, and each item were of a more common rarity, basically meaning it was worth less, and these “currency-items” were no different, they were fewer. So less good items to craft with, and less currency to use while crafting. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Earlier, each enemy had a set chance, as I said, to drop these items. These chances were in turn boosted by adding crafts to the map itself, before opening it. That made an enemy who were likely to drop some items, drop even more items. And when you kill lots of these enemies, lots of items are going to drop – making “juicing” a great investment. That means, that you put in more of your currencies to craft the map to have the most amount of enemies as possible. If a non-crafted, blank map had, say, 50 enemies, a fully “juiced” map could end up with well over 4-500 enemies, all with boosted drop chances. One correctly boosted map could very well be worth 100 times a “blank map”. But they changed this too – instead of letting this “drop-chance boost” and “juice-map” go on, they removed the drop chance boost, returning every enemy drop table to the original one, and changed it so that the most amount of loot doesnt drop from killing the monsters, but rather completing a mission, such as “killing that mob”, or “killing that boss”, or “finishing this league mechanic”.
Couple that with the fact that they had boosted enemy health so that instead of rushing and killing 50 enemies in 10s – which definitely wasnt unthinkable before – now you have to stand and fight with a single enemy for.. I mean, I had a fight with a group of enemies spawn during a league mechanic, and that fight took me 5 minutes. At that point I just quit.
Oh, and dont forget “item culling”. Before, the amount of loot that dropped was almost bordering on insane – there were more loot that dropped than you could feasibly carry through all the portals – but that just made the devs come up with the idea that “ok, so most people dont pick up items that have these stats and these ranges on other stats, or these combinations of stats, or these base items, so whenever a mob actually does drop one of them, we just remove those from the game completely, so they dont even drop!”. Sounds like a great idea, except for the fact that… most currency early game comes from picking such items up and vendoring them. There are “vendor recipes” that, when you turn in a certain amount of a type of item, or a combination of certain items, those can give you a pretty significant return of currencies. And not only that, even if that item aren’t necessary a good upgrade for you, you might still pick it up to sell to someone else, in turn generating currencies for you that way. And tune that “item culling” the wrong way, you end up culling items that people actually want. Or need.

If you mix all these things together with the fact that the new league mechanic seemed bugged and didn’t even work most of the time, people ended up getting frustrated because they felt like they couldn’t progress the game like they used to, and on top of that they got stonewalled by enemies who were too tough to beat with the items they had, because of all these system changes were making it nigh on impossible to get better gear. A lot of people quit the game, from 152’000 people playing at launch, there’s actually less than 40’000 less than 4 weeks later. That’s almost 75% of the entire player base that just up and left.

I mean, I get it. Grinding Gear Games wanted a slower paced game, where instead of everyone just trying to get everything min-maxed when it came to loots, actually slowed down and interacted with the game and it’s mechanics in a slower fashion. But…what I dont get is, they’re currently working on PoE 2 right now, where they will have all of this already. Why not let PoE 1 run haywire like it has been before, and let PoE 2 be the new game that actually have their original vision in it? No, instead they pissed off most of their player base and people left.

Now, to be fair, over the course of a league, many people do end up leaving the game when they feel like they’ve done everything they can. GGG wanted these people to “stay for longer”, that’s why they slowed down the pace of the game. People just left because they felt they couldnt progress instead. But the player base drop hasn’t been this hard or fast before, and not this angry.

Those two games, and League, as usual, are the only three games I’ve actually come around to play these last few months. I’ve booted up New World and played with the new instrument-mechanic, sure, and I bought the second expansion of Back 4 Blood – although, I never came around to play it – and a few smaller sessions on the PS5, one where I played Spiderman for 5 hours one evening, or tried Trials of Mana for a few hours.. but actually played? These three games are the things I’ve “focused” on. And honestly, D3 has only been the last week, so it hasn’t even been that much gaming.

Now, what I have done most.. is coughing. And TV-shows through Netflix and Prime. I can’t wait to get back on my feet properly and do something.

All I’m going to say, is that summer takes a toll on me. Allergies, heat, kids out of school and kindergarten..

Atleast I found a new toy – I’m making art!

So, a new update for Diablo 4 came out a couple of days ago, and honestly, it does give me back a bit of hope I lost after Diablo Immoral. Apparently, they’re also further along than I thought!

Not only have they made a great job with the aestetics – graphics – the enemies they showcase in a new video actually seems to be fully functioning now – they move, they attack, they’ve got death animations.. Everything seems fairly fleshed out.

They’ve got something called “Paragon Boards”, which basically functions as a skilltree. We’ve known that for a while, they showcased a WIP for an idea of it, but in the new video, it was more finetuned, visually overhauled so it looked pretty finished.

Later, in Diablo 3, the Demon Hunter would almost make sense to compare to the Rogue – infinite ammo, using bows and crossbows, trying to keep the enemy at bay.. except that while the Rogue could use plate armor, they didnt have the same kind of defense in Diablo 3 – rather they opted for another defense-type; in Diablo 3, all melee classes got a built-in 30% damage reduction, whereas ranged classes, such as the Witch Doctor, Demon Hunter, Wizard and Necromancer, did not get that damage reduction.

This meant that every time an enemy did, say, 100 points of damage, a Barbarian would only need to deal with 70 points, and then count of their actual resistances. In Diablo 1, a plate-wearing Barbarian and a plate-wearing Rogue would deal with the same amount of damage, but in Diablo 3 a Barbarian innately deals with far less damage taken than a Demon Hunter – therefore, I’d argue that a Rogue and a Demon Hunter is different on that specific alone. But wait – a Demon Hunter also keeps enemies at bay! Sure, but not by magic, like the Rogue – but rather by movement skills, such as Vault. Rogues knows magic – Demon Hunters does not. But yeah, ok, both Rogues and Demon Hunters uses dexterity stats to deal damage, you say. Fair enough, I’ll give you that – but I counter with the fact that Rogues were supposed to be magic users, while Demon Hunters are supposedly “normal people” that just hated demons so much they channeled it into use.

They fit into the same class-niche – a fast-paced damage dealer who uses dexterity as a damage stat, that is “too fast to hit”. But that’s about it. You could just as well argue that Barbarians and Crusaiders are the same, because they both are “too tanky to kill” and both uses strength as their primary stats.

And for quite obvious reasons I barely mentions Diablo Immoral, but yes, most of Diablo 3 classes are in Diablo Immoral, save Witch Doctor. That’s the only Diablo 3 class that didnt turn up in Diablo Immoral – yet, atleast.

Not only that they have five classes, by the way, you’re now also allowed to customize your character to look however you want! They did that in Diablo Immoral too, but that’s a phonescreen.. How often will you look at your character there? I’m not sure about genders though, they havent said anything specifically about that, but I assume it’s most likely like in the other games that came out recently – female and male versions of all classes. They didnt say it, but they included something in the video that implies it. It does look like it’s a variant of a Barbarian – just not as buff as she was in Diablo 3.

It could very well be one of the other classes though – it was not specified, it could have very well been a female Necromancer there in that shot.

Which is weird, to be honest. All the explicitly stated Barbarians shown has been male, as with the Druids. They use “he” about everything they say about both Barbarians and Druids – but “she” when they’re talking about Rogues and Sorcerers. Necromancers though have no pronouns used, but the Necromancer itself looks female.

Although – when I googled to find out, I see people on different sites, “game journalists”, atleast claim that Diablo 4 classes arent gender locked, and that you can play a female Barbarian, or a male Sorcerer. But I havent found any sources showing that it’s something Blizzard itself has claimed. Note – it might very well be something they’ve said and I’ve completely missed it, like in an interview or a video or something, and that I probably should have seen that statement – so take my word with a grain of salt, please. It’s absolutely possible that Blizzard made the classes opened for male and female, and that I’ve simply missed it. I dont want to spread a rumour that says that there’s only two male classes and three female classes – I’m just saying that if so, then I have missed that statement.

The game also is non-linear open-world, with “almost 150 dungeons” in the game, roaming world bosses, random local events, strongholds that you clear out and make into towns.. It’s almost MMO-esque, in a way, with shared worlds, cross-play.. (Although, they just specified Xbox and PC, and couch-coop on Xbox – I assume Playstation can coop with PC and Xbox as well, they just didnt specify that)

If you imagine Diablo in Elden Ring – open world, dungeons, roaming world bosses.. it seems like Diablo 4 will be a whole lot of fun!

They also said that they’re going to keep the game alive – adding onto it, making new stuff.

And all of it is released sometime NEXT YEAR.

So I’ve been playing a bit of zombie-slaying for a couple of weeks, it’s actually pretty fun. The absolute worst thing about it though, is the PUGs. Sometimes you find a great group, they might not always know what they’re doing – where to go, keep an eye out for alarms, common tactics for area-control, etc. – but it’s fine. I dont need everyone to know they have to pick up totems, to use toolkits on stashdoors, to save molotovs for hordes and handgrenades for specials, etc. But when they know none of these things, as well as run around picking totems up to throw them behind because “trash melee weapon”, or blast the back of my head with any gun they might have because they dont know friendly fire exists, it’s getting kind of irritating. I admit, I’m not perfect either – there’s things I’m still learning, such as only yesterday I found out that barbed wire not only slows zombies, it actually also does a small DoT on them. There’s things I still learn, and crutches I still use – one of the cards I run in every deck is “Down In Front”, where when every time I crouch I toggle friendly fire off, both as doing and getting – just because I cant be arsed at the moment to try to compensate for teammates trying to run infront of me every time I decide to unload on an enemy.

Sometimes though, you find a team where everyone knows what they’re doing, atleast just enough, that you breeze through the act. Everyone buys team upgrades, shares resources, gives ammo in need, doesnt just hog the legendary attachments for themselves – why do you need a legendary scope on a revolver? Just take the epic sight and let someone who uses scopes take the legendary one. Everyone looks out for alarms, assassinates snitches, use barbed wires in chokepoints, heals each other, each person have their own role.. not everyone needs to look out for the same special – sometimes it’s fine to let someone else get kill-credit!

It’s a fun game – I just kinda wish I wasnt the only one in my friend-circle playing it. Although, I can somewhat understand it, while it is the L4D formula improved upon, the open Beta wasnt that great for them, and they do have other games to play instead. Like…PUBG. And COD.

There’s also a small update on the Diablo franchise! Diablo 4 is soon to be release…ing a new update. Last was late March, so it’s just a month away for another update. The game itself? Probably not out for a couple of more years. However, Diablo Immoral have released!

Oh, sorry, it’s apparently Diablo Immortal. Could’ve fooled me – worse cashgrab of a garbage pile you can look for and not find.

It’s a pretty decent game – it looks like they kind of ported Diablo 3 to phone-User interface/gaming experiences, and while some new versions of the old features are pretty slick – the skill system isnt as customizable as D3, but more streamlined which in itself is pretty nice looking, but the rest of it seems like it’s still the same – small tweaks on Rifts, you can enter rifts without being max level, still the same disenchanting deal where you break down items for materials, and there’s an auto-pickup feature! That one I like! On the other hand, almost exactly everything costs money. There’s several streamers who have covered it already, but it’s not like “buy the game for $60 and get everything” – it’s legit microtransactions on steriods. It’s disgusting, and it should be discouraged. Asmongold actually showed the differences the other day, and it’s beyond words. Either you play the game for free, and basically get nothing, or you pay $20+ each rift to get basically what GR100+ rifts in D3 gives. Now, Asmongold can afford to do this – he does it to show the rest of us how ludicrous it is – so he’s not hurting. But the entire game premise is cashgrab, it’s predatory and it’s disgusting. The entire game is basically a skin for a slotmachine – anyone with addiction problems, bad handle with money or any other issues will end up throwing away their money, more than they actually can afford. It’s cynical, it’s predatory, it’s insane, and it’s immoral.

I downloaded it – they have a client for both phones and PC, so that you can play “better” on PC and “on the go” on your phone, just to really maximize the amount of time you can play the game, offering you more “chances” to end up paying for it. And no, it’s not like League of Legends, who sells overpriced skins for the game or at their worst let you buy champions for real money so you can play outside of the free champ circulation, and it’s not like most other games where you pay a one-time cost of up to $60 to get everything – or sometimes more, now that DLC’s end up carrying most of the game mechanics for a lot of games – no, Diablo Immoral actually lets you spend a whole lot more.

Like, a whopping $100 000 for one character to be fully kitted out – ingame power and cosmetics included. Or should I say “costmetic”?

I know, now there’s probably a few of you saying “well, just dont buy it then!”, and that’s a valid point. Just as valid as to say “just stop smoking”. It’s not something a lot of people chose, it’s addiction. They cant help themselves. And before you go on a rant saying “well, games are bad, because of that” – how did you end up smoking?

So yeah, while the gambling-skin that is called Diablo Immortal on the surface seems like a good game, it’s probably only because they re-purposed Diablo 3 in a new UI/UX and ported it to phones. I would much rather just still go buy the now 10-year old game of actual Diablo 3. While I dont really condone what Blizzard is doing, and dont really feel like they deserve more money after this absolute dungpile, I rather let them gain only $40 from you to play an actual game instead of risking draining your wallet with a mockery of a game. And with those $40, you actually end up with the entire game, complete with all the seasons they put out. Admittedly, there was tendencies even when D3 came out that Blizzards wanted to use Diablo as a cashgrab, but that was put down almost immediately. While I would’ve liked some sort of trade between people, the implementation was just horrible. If they atleast opened it up a bit more – like, instead of a real-money-transfer auction house, they could’ve made an ingame auction house like in WoW. But I dont know, in the end it might have gone inflation in it, because of how much gold there actually is in that game.

The €25 option gives you just enough to get a fully Legendary Crest-stacked rift, which basically equates to a GR100+. Not even guaranteeing the best materials – and you can even lose out on it if you fail the rift. There’s so much more wrong with this “game” it’s bordering on stupid.

To be perfectly honest – this “game”-release has me legitimately worried about how Diablo 4 will come out. I’m less inclined to even look at that game now, because of how messed up Diablo Immoral is.

I have yet to played any Elden Ring Survival mod, because it hasnt released yet. I’m as of yet unsure when I will be playing some as well, as I need to wait for the next time the kids visits their mom. Which should be this coming weekend – but that’s also just two days. And I need time to download, install, test the mod out, iron any flaws out, etc, and then I can play for real. So, when the actual playthrough will go off, I’m not yet sure. Grimrukh himself says that it’ll release late Monday night – which is today, but considering timezones, it’s not until late Monday night CST. I also am not sure when Lobos will be streaming the game, or for how long, but the mod-release will be after Lobosjr’s stream – I will link to his youtube here when it’s up, until then, I suggest you look out for his stream!

I have also not been playing any New World since last. They’re trying to stay relevant – which is all good, and perhaps they succeed, I just dont pay much attention to it anymore. I know they’ve had a Dev vs Streamer fight, which I obviously did not take part of – even if I was a large streamer, I’ve stopped playing the game, and while I do believe I’m still in their (very open and large, I admit, they accepted anyone who wanted to apply) New World Creator program.. I’m just a creator in name for now. Not that my “creation” was that great to begin with – but hey, they accepted me into their program, along with everyone else.

I probably should just remove it from my PC all together by this point.

Vampire Survivors are still churning out updates – they’ve got more weapons and accessories available, more maps and characters. It’s starting to look like a pretty complex game now! I kinda feel bad though, because it was almost “too cheap”. It’s less than €2.40! It’s one of those games, where you buy them because it’s a quick, easy, cheap games, and end up realizing it’s underpriced like hell.

Me and the oldest have also played through It Takes Two, which was a really great game! We both loved it, but we almost felt like it was a “too long” game in the end. Not sure if the novelty slowly drained out, or if the later maps were just…well, not “bad”, but rather “not as good” as the earlier ones. We also didnt care much for the cutscenes, we liked the gameplay too much to even watch them – also, we both really disliked the book. Everytime he showed up, we just immediately skipped. We made it a point to find and play through the minigames though, and while I ended up winning most, the kid actually got a decent amount of wins. The funniest we ended up doing though, was climbing the Helltower. We basically competed to do it, and it was close several times, he was climbing slower than me for a while, and when I was at the upper part he was still climbing the lower, but I ended up falling so often, that at one point he was the platform below the top when I had just fallen to the ground. In the end though, I think I crushed the little guys spirit, because we both fell so often and I ended up beating the tower at the same time he fell to the ground. He never attempted the tower after that.

Also, we both empathized a bit more with Cody than May – she seemed like an ass towards Cody half the time. He had always tried, but she was too selfcentered to bother it seemed. I felt bad for the guy.

I also got my hands on the new game V Rising – which has been compared to, almost like a “vampire-esque Valheim”, which doesnt look too far off. I havent played Valheim myself, but I’ve seen enough of both games to see why they’re compared to eachother like that. It seems super fun, but it’s also one of those games where I seem pressed to find time to get into. If anyone is interested, I know both Cohh and Zizaran loves the game, and Cohh even have two entire playlists of the game! Apparently Zizaran is going to boot up a server with other streamers, but I’m not sure when he’ll be streaming it, or where it’ll be available for viewing. We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess!

Fun fact – both developers are from the same town in Sweden! One is Stunlock Studios, and the other is Iron Gate Studio.
Bonus fact, Iron Gate Studio’s game, Valheim, is published by yet another company from the same town, Coffee Stain Publishing – which, through Holding Companies, are the same guys that released the Sanctum-games, Satisfactory, Goat Simulator; Coffee Stain Studios.

Stray is soon to be released too, on both Steam and Playstation – that game will be interesting! I’m not entirely sure where I will be getting it, but I’m leaning towards Playstation, to be honest. It’s not a competetive PvP game, so there’s no real “need” to have it on a PC, and it doesnt exactly hurt to have it on PS.

It’s an exploration-game where you play as that cat! Apparently, you’ve lost your family and your goal is to escape the city, I guess in order to find your family? Either way, it looks awesome, the few videos I’ve watched makes it look awesome!

Speaking of other games that is yet to release – Darktide now has a release date, September 13th. It’s the guys who did Vermintide, so it’s almost guaranteed that it’ll be a solid Horde-swarm game! Not too shabby price either, €40 for the game, €60 for the “Imperial Edition”. For anyone who doesnt know, Vermintide is a co-op game where you play as one of five characters trying to stem the tide of vermins (large rats) trying to end the world – hence the name “Vermintide”. Darktide is the same thing, except whereas Vermintide is set in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar universe, Darktide is Warhammer’s futuristic space-universe, Warhammer 40’000. I hope this game will be more interesting for my friends, because I’d love to play the hell out of this game with them.

Yeah, it’s a little under three months since last now, but it’s all good. I’ve been doing fairly well, too.

I’ve ended up sleeping on the couch so much – since it’s also a sofa-bed – that I actually upgraded one of my sons bed by giving him mine. Before, he and the youngest one had a Kritter each, but I figured since I dont really use my bed anyway, and the boy really loves that bed, why not? As an added bonus, his Kritter bed could be carried over to their moms house, for our youngest to use, since there he still had a travel crib to sleep in. It’s one used for toddlers up to three years old, so it’s technically still fine, and he’s been pretty happy with having a real bed at her place now.

This actually opened up a lot of space in my living room, so now there’s actually a play-area here. The furnitures that took up space in the middle of the room now stands where the bed used to stand, so there’s just a large spot on the floor the kids can play on – and play they have. I’m still finding toys everywhere.

Speaking about toys, I got a tip from the kindergarten that there’s a toy called “Plus Plus” – it’s like a building block toy shaped like two connected plus-signs. I know my youngest kid have been very fond of wooden blocks and duplo and regular lego, even though he’s just about to turn three, and apparently, at kindergarten, he spends a lot of time playing with Plus Plus. So, I ordered a 150 set box that arrived yesterday and I gave him the box. As soon as he saw the box and understood what it was inside, he almost teared up with joy and got so excited. I dont recall I’ve ever seen him that excited from a gift before. Then I opened the box, and he and I played with those toys for over an hour. He was so happy. His mom also told me that he’d been very excited over a toy in one of those toy-magazines, apparently called Magical Magnet – it looks something like this. I’m not sure if it’s the colours that got him excited or if he understood it’s a type of building block toy. But building toys seems to be his favorites.

Perhaps I should invest in more of them – meccano and the likes – as he grows older.

As for my firstborn, it seems as if crafting supplies and PS games should do the trick. When I got my PS5, I handed over my PS4 to use, and even created an account to use, but now I need to get the kid a couple of games as well. But colour pens, box cutters, tape, glue.. those sort of things should work out.

As for my soon-to-be five year old, he seems to be following in the footsteps of his older sibling. He’s very fond of drawing – both on tablet and with colour pens and crayons. He’s very interested in playing games as well, and he’s been allowed to play on my PS5 a couple of times – mostly Astro’s Playroom, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles and Bugsnax. He’s still in that place where he doesnt know what he wants to play, just that he wants to play, so he’s switching games almost more than he’s playing them. I also got him Sonic Racing, because I figured that a racing game might be fun for him, and he loves Sonic. Sonic the movie, Sonic as a character, Sonic youtube clips, etc. I dont see the appeal – the movie was good, but I’ve never liked Sonic myself. But hey – he does. That’s the important thing.

As for games, I admit I still havent finished Demon’s Souls. I still have that swamp area left and the final boss, but I’ve just been too busy, and when I’ve had time to wind down and play something else, I’ve actually been playing Elden Ring. I did a bit of a boo-boo when it comes to that though, I pre-ordered it on PC at first, last year, I believe. Then closer to the release, I read there was a type of hack for the Dark Souls games, an RCE (Remote Code Execution) that could potentially brick your PC. I was not happy about that thought, and noone knew if it was possible to do that on Elden Ring as well.

So, I pre-ordered it on PS5 and have been playing it there since. I did try it out on PC, but I had a bit of issues there, so I swapped over to the PS5. Apparently, they’ve fixed the RCE-thing, but I’m not taking any chances. I want to play with people, invade, get invaded, and while PS5 isnt a hundred percent fool-proof, it’s still way better than PC. So, it’s been a waste to buy it on PC, you might ask? No, not really, because I might actually get to mod a FromSoftware game ever later this year. Elden Ring PC will be modded through Grimrukhs mods, and I will ofcourse be playing offline in that case. So PS5 will be the online gaming experience, and PC will be the offline Survival Elden Ring experience.

By the way, all my Elden Ring playing I’ve been streaming – except for like 10 minutes of invading at one point – and I’ve compiled it all over at my Youtube, in case you’re interested. We dont know if there’ll be DLC’s for this game yet, but if there is, this is the character I’ll be using to check it out. I have so far been doing everything that I can, I’m still level 150 – which isnt that terribly high, people are talking about 125 being the “max meta”, and at 150 I’m able to get several stats up to a decent level, without necessarily min-maxing. Also, I have these stats I do, because I use gear that needs them just because I like the gear – not because it’s an “optimal build” – that’s why I “need” the level 150. Though, I’ve seen people level up to 180 on their first playthrough, and some even up to 200-210, so 150 is actually fairly low, considering. The playlist will be updated in the future if I keep playing on that character, so keep an eye out!

I will also be doing a separate playlist on Youtube for my offline Grimrukh Survival streaming when I start streaming that, but you should know that the quality would most likely drop on that one. I dont have a dual PC setup to play on/stream on, so I’m both running the game, the mods, and the streaming stuff on the same PC, so it’ll most likely be a bit…choppy, unfortunately. But it’ll be there!

As for other games.. I’m still looking at Diablo 4 announcements, and it actually does seem like they wont release until a few years. I had kind of hoped they showed up early development when they started to share, but it seems as if that was actually current. Which means it’s actually earlier in development than I had hoped. It’s still very basic. They released a few videos showcasing areas, and it does look good. But it was just that – areas. It’s no real gameplay implemented, and while there was a couple of mobs placed, it doesnt seem there’s an AI added yet. Sorry for the link-spamming, but I feel like it’s only fair if I give you people a chance to see for yourself. Although, to be fair – the Diablo IV dev team have been open about this being a pre-alpha development, but I just…hoped they’d be further along in that alpha.

I’m still looking at New World from time to time, but there’s just so many small things gone wrong I just lost interest. There was so many bugs preventing trades, gold accumulation bugs that caused entire economies to spiral out of control, and other small issues, that I eventually just lost interest. I still think it’s one of the better MMO’s out there – sure, WoW is larger and are arguably better, but to me less interesting. It’s still one of the most immersive ones, to me, anyway. It’s just sad it has that many bugs. And bots. And.. well, I lost interest. They did implement a new weapon though, a blunderbuss, which was kinda fun. But I tried it out and it was kinda buggy. About a third of the time I shot, at point blank, I was still missing, and some of the skills could either go used with no CD, or have their CD start counting without me getting the skill used. It’s still a horribly coded mess. It’s a shame, because I had such high hopes, and I would’ve stuck with it if it was good.

I mentioned Vampire Survivor in my last post, and I still play it. It’s still not 1.0, but I’ve got 28 hours into it already. I mean, it might not sound like much, 28 hours over the last few months, but since it’s not intended to be this huge game, it’s actually pretty decent amount. It’s actually really fun, and since it’s just around £2/€2.4/$2.5, I highly recommend it! I just hope they’ll eventually release it on PlayStation, because it’s actually very easy to play with a controller anyway – almost easier than a keyboard or mouse, in my opinion.

For now though, I’m mostly waiting for Warhammer 40’000: Darktide to play with a couple of friends, and until then I dont know really what I’ll be playing. Something might come along, or I’ll revisit some older games I own – like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fallout.. that, or I’m thinking of getting both the re-released Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance – the old Black Isle/Interplay from 2001 that got re-released a few months ago, as well as the new Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance that came out last year. Even if it pretty much “bombed”. Both of them runs something along the lines of £47/€55/$58, so I will most likely not pick both of them up, and I think I’ll wait for a sale, to be honest. But me and the 14 year old would probably have a lot of fun playing the old Baldurs Gate one. I still have a lot of memories from that game.

Or, I’ll pick them up in October, when I’m finally free of my payment plans! That will free up a couple of hundreds each month right there.

So, I finally managed to get my hands on a couch.

Or well, it’s more “finally got around to buy a new one”. I have looked around for a used one for a good while, fairly clean, cheap and close by, but it’s like this triangle – “chose two, cannot chose three”. I’ve actually found some couches that’s really clean and for free – as long as you pick them up yourself – but they’ve all been like hundreds of miles away. Or there was a really clean one that one of the neighbours had up – for three times the retail price. One couch I found that was just a few miles away, pretty cheap one, running something along the lines of $50, but it was crusty, torn, one of the seat cushions were missing half the filling.. The absolute worst couch I saw though, were one dirty and torn couch that the seller wanted several hundreds for – almost close to retail price – and they demanded that you came and got it yourself. The kicker? “Because of the pandemic, they didnt want to let you in, so they’d carry the couch out to the sidewalk for a fee.” How large a fee?

The same as they wanted for the couch. So if I wanted that type of couch, I could literally buy a brand new and buy the option of delivery, and still spend less money.

So I did.

It’s actually really comfortable – atleast according to my youngest two kids. It’s been a fort, a hurdle to climb, they’ve used it as a trampoline.. Almost anything but as a couch.

I have yet to sit in it myself, and my oldest haven’t got a clue it’s even here, so it’ll be fun to see that reaction!

As a result, I’ve redecorated here, so my bed is back by the windows again, and the TV – which basically act as a PS5 monitor and Alexa TV-unit – is back in the corner of the room. Now I’ve almost paid off an expensive monthly payment too, so I’m on the verge of getting a new TV bench and bookshelves too!

It’s “just” $950, not including the delivery. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make that within half a year or so. Maybe a year. Though, when I buy these, I will have to redecorate again, moving the TV back to where I have the bench, swap places with the couch and PC desk, and bed back to where I just had it. The shelves I have now I have to get rid of, so I can fit these in.

I’m also contemplating getting a furniture for a sort of “coffee island” too – get a kettle, coffee brewer, a can of hunny, a box of tea, mugs, glasses, a cold-water dispenser and a bunch of other stuff related to it. Like a coffee-bar, but as a “kitchen island”, in the living room. It would be cool, but I feel like I would never leave the living room if I do that – bed, PC, PS5, TV, coffee – it’s all there! I only need a minifridge for snacks and drinks, and I’ve got a studio apartment inside my actual apartment!

I haven’t gotten much time playing Demon’s Souls for a while, so I haven’t finished it yet. In the first world, I actually only have King Allant left, and I have the entirety of the Archstone of the Chief left, the Valley of Defilement. Although, I can definitely see how this game is considered by some to be the best of the soulsborne games!

Instead, I’ve actually bought Vampire Survivors, a $3 game or so. It’s still in early access, so it’s not too much there yet, but it’s fun as heck! I’ve done all there is to do now, all achievements, played all the characters, unlocked all the maps, used all the various weapons.. I cant recommend it enough!

So, I know it’s been a good while since I wrote, but I have an excuse – just let me think of a good one.

I actually got my hands on a PS5 this christmas, and let me tell you, it’s been a BLAST! I’ve played both Jedi Fallen Order – not a game I recommend, to be honest, but had it been a TV-series I would’ve recommended it, the story was actually that good, gameplay not so much – and a bit of Dark Souls 1 and 3. But I also got to play Demon’s Souls finally. Funnily enough, I pre-ordered the game over a year ago, before the PS5 even came out, because I thought I’d just save up a bit of money and get the PS5 just slightly after launch. I did not expect that the PS5 would be this hard to get.. but over a year after the launch, I finally got to play it.

I tried to play Demon’s Souls on the PS3 a couple of years ago, but the clunkyness, the slow loading times, the fact that it was a PS3 when I had a PS4 and gotten used to the games on that one.. and the fact that the game was so damn dark that I couldnt make out many details.. I didnt even play past the first boss – the actual first boss, not the tutorial one. I’ve also seen a bunch of streams playing this game, like Happy Hob, LobosJr, and a few more, but since it’s a game I havent played yet, I decided to not pay that much attention to it – I’ve seen some bosses and how Hob cheeses a few of them, I’ve seen the general tone of some areas, like the tunnel levels, but I have made sure to not look at too much, like where items are, the layout, where you have certain NPC’s, etc. But yeah, things to stick over the years, so it’s not a completely blind run I’ve had. But with the PS5, I’ve been having the time of my life.

While I know of the mechanics of World Tendencies and generally how they function, the basic idea of how miracles and spells are separated and so on, most things were new to me. I purposefully had not paid attention to the routes, so finding my way around these areas were just great. I did cheat at one point, I had completely missed a wheel turning on an elevator in the second level, and after a couple of hours worth of searching I actually looked it up – I was just blind, since the wheel to turn on the outside elevator were just beside the door. I still think that it has been mostly a blind playthrough – I had nothing major spoiled before, like hidden enemies, world maps, where you find important items such as keys, and so on.

Which is also why I was so caught off guard by an NPC that I met.

So, I first played through the first level, got a couple of great weapons and armor pieces – I decided to kill Old King Doran, mostly because I found the area and they were hard-hitting and I assumed they would give me lots of souls, so I just decided to make sure they died – looked everywhere for every secret I could find, killed the first boss, got through the next area and fought the tower knight and realized that the next area would whoop my delicate bee-hive.

So I tried out some of the other areas. Got into the fourth map, and realized that I remember that Hob often finds his main weapon there, quite early. I knew it was up the stairs, to the left and then out on the ledge, so.. yeah, if it’s good enough for him throughout the game, it’s good enough for me. I found it and actually cleared out large parts of that map, killed the first boss and unlocked some guy as a vendor, Bilge. His Soul Remains got me through the next part down to the next boss – which I decided against doing. I then switched to the second world, which I cleared out in one single run – from first archstone to last boss. By that time, I had enough health, enough damage on my falchion and still the Old King Dorans armor, so the boss I believed was the hardest – Flamelurker – was actually very simple. Then I decided to play through the prison area, so I played through the prison, got up to the towers, cleared that out and realized that the next area is a swamp area… yeah, no, I dont feel like doing that right now. Oh, I also remember that Lobos always kills this one guy in a prisoncage that acts like an elevator, so I did too, and realized that I had actually found an armor that was way better than the one I had. A little heavier, a little less defense at some parts, but resistances against poison and plague were just awesome.

So I went back to the fourth map, went through the catacombs and cleared out the entire fourth map, last boss and all. So, now back to the first map, and played through after the Tower Knight.

Searching through the first world after the Tower Knight, I realized something, and that was that I had made the right choice. Everything hurt a lot more past Tower Knight and took more of a beating – even with an upgraded Crescent Falchion and my stats upgraded as much as they were, I barely three-hit basic enemies. Dont misunderstand, it’s great that I dont just breeze through enemies and maps, it’s still fun to have a challenge, but if I were trying out that area before the other two maps, I would’ve had a hard time.

I cleared out every nook and crannie I found, killed every enemy, unlocked shortcut after shortcut, found keys, items, weapons, and kept going. I found the next boss, “The Penetrator”, and basically instantly died to him, and I mean.. yeah, that’s kind of expected. But during that run, I had found a couple of keys, and I remembered I had run into a couple of locked doors, and there had been other areas I could see but not reach, so I figured I might as well look into that instead. Sure enough, eventually I found this small prison with an enemy there, killed him and started opening cell doors and found this one guy sitting there, Biorr. I wasnt sure at all what he was all about, but he seemed gentle, merry, friendly.. I decided to let him live, he reminded me a bit of some of the other NPC’s in later Dark Souls games, so he was just great like that.

When I had explored through the entire map again, I decided to run to the boss and just homeward-bone after I picked up my soul-patch again, there was about 30 000 souls there. True, I had a bunch again after having cleared out the map, but I figured I might as well, and then use all those souls to level up. So I clear out the stairs, prepare to bone home, enter the fog gate, and out of view to my right, I just hear in my headphones, a deep, friendly voice calmly says – “Do you need some help?”.

Caught completely off guard, I just turn around and sure enough, there’s Biorr. Standing inside the boss room, waiting for me to get there. He then continues, “By the honour of the good knights! This demonic folly shall be stopped once and for all!”, and just charges the boss. So, yeah.. I had planned to just find my soul-patch and bone home, but this guy starts wrecking the boss, so I’m just, “Yeah, I guess we’re doing this.”

And he just tears through the boss, but at one point I’m a bit worried because he gets pierced and lifted into the air and I see he just has about half health left. Finally we bring the boss down to almost nothing, I back off to heal a bit, and Biorr, the absolute badass he is just shaves off the last centimeter of life the boss has left, and I just hear him roar of laughter.

I got goosebumps from that, he was just a badass through and through.

Things like that in a game, taking me completely by surprise, is the best. It’s a shame I never played the game before this, but I’ve got to say, it was completely worth the wait. I’m still not finished, I still have the final boss in first map, the rest of the prison map past the swamp, and the entire valley of defilement, but honestly.. in the entire Soulsborne series, I actually believe that Demon’s Souls – the remake, atleast – is my new favorite. It used to be DS1, then DS3, then DSR, Bloodborne, and DS2 – but DeS just picked the first place above DS1. And I still have lots left to play.

And since I got the PS5 for myself this christmas, I actually gave my oldest the PS4 as a hand-me-down, and created a PS-account and started to buy a few games on there, so there’s still use for the PS4. It just changed owner.

As I said, it’s been a while. I didnt play that much WoW in the end, I dont think I played more than a week more after last post. What I did do, however, was play in the various Beta’s for New World. I’m not sure how much I can talk about my different experiences and discoveries though – not because I’m under any NDA, but because they’ve been Betas; it’s bound to be changed until launch.

Which, by the way, have been pushed up a couple of times. In the end, the launch is September 28th – or so they say so far. I hope that they dont change it, but then again, there was a good amount of bugs in the last Beta that they need to squash, so it’s not impossible that they need more time anyway. Which is understandable, but annoying. At this point, I’ve played through the games opening that many times I feel almost burnt out on it. It wouldn’t be as bad if it was by my own choice to create more characters, but all these wipes after a Beta is wearing me down a bit. Why play if all my progress gets deleted with frequent and irregular intervals? The open Beta this summer had a two week window, and I got pretty far, had loads of fun – but the last Beta were only spanning four different days. Atleast there’s only ~two weeks left until launch now.

At this point, I’m not sure what I want. On one hand, I want them to postpone the game for as long as they actually need to, finish the game to where the bugs arent gamebreaking atleast, polish everything up – but dont give us a date that will need to be pushed up, constantly. This is what I feel they’ve been doing so far, and I’m fine with it – except the constant date-to-push-up deal. On the other hand, I kinda want them to release the game, and let us play, and let us keep all the progress we do, delete the griefers and exploit abusers progress – perhaps banning them – and update the game as they go. I expect them to do that anyway, but I feel like this wouldn’t be that far off from what they’ve been doing so far – except for the progress wipe.

I dont know. There’s so much going on behind the curtains that I dont know about, I really dont know which is more probable or even realistic. I just know two things – I want to play now, and I want to keep my progress instead of having it wiped constantly. That’s why I decided to stop participating in Betas, because at actual launch, I want to be able to immerse myself completely, instead of going two-three levels deep and just feel mehh.

Going on other details – Diablo 4 hasn’t really come out with much. Besides the three confirmed classes they’ve had, they added the Rogue. I’ve also been under the impression that the game was fairly close to launch – within a few years from when I heared about it, so say 2022? I’m now under the impression that it’s more like they went out with the disclosure that they were doing a D4 game when they decided to start working on it, for PR fixing, which means the game might not even be out until 2025. Perhaps later. All the other updates they’ve had on their Diablo 4 page has instead been all about Diablo 2 remake. Like.. yey.

A game I never played back in the day, a game I’m not interested in, a game I did try to play a few times but never got the compability to work. I tried the remake Beta a bit, I tried the Amazon class – which by the way drew a lot of complaints on how they rendered her – and honestly… I mean..

Yes. Sure. It was a lot better than I expected it to be – the classic graphics were pretty darn close to the actual classic game, I give them that, and the updated graphics made the game a whole lot easier to see and identify what was going on. I own the original games, and as I mentioned I always had issues to get the game working on PC – old games isn’t really compatible with new PC’s, and compability mode hasn’t really worked for me. I only got the game working if I didnt use fullscreen – and I refuse to play games in windowed mode, especially when said window is only a third of the actual monitor. I am still not interested in playing Diablo 2 remake.

Had I stumbled upon the remake before I tried to play D2 before, I might have been more interested, but at this time, I’m simply not interested. D2 Remake is a good…”ad” for the game, but not good enough that get your interest from zero to actually-interested-enough-to-buy. Atleast not my interest.

So, when it comes to Diablo news, I guess the latest is “hey, we’re still working pre-alpha stuff and we’re working hard because D4 was just announced out of the blue as a PR stunt, and while we wait 3 months between infodumps we also make D2remake and instead of dumping info about D4 we’re going to dump D2 info! let us work in peace until we’ve come far enough to actually announce D4 in the first place, then we can pretend it’s something we were actually working on!”. I hope I’m wrong, but that is what it seems like – to me, that is.

Kids got their schedule changed, by the way, the two youngest that is. Their mother hangs out with them a bit every day, and that means that she mostly helps me with dropping off and picking them up at daycare. So, the kindergarten talked to her and recommended her that the boys changed their schedule from three ours a day, five days a week, to three days a week, five hours at the time. The reason they gave her, was that the youngest one might need it, because it’s more of a disruption for him than anything else – he doesn’t have time enough to get comfortable at the daycare before their time is up and he’s going home, so they thought that maybe, if he gets more time each day, then he might finally settle in time before he’s picked up again. Seems reasonable enough – but that only adds to my suspicion that he, just as I, have a diagnosis. There’s always been small tells, which I’ve brought up with them at the kindergarten, and they’ve so far agreed to having seen those tells. I think I should try to open up an investigation about that at some point. Anyway, since they asked her about it, she said that they should call me about it – they haven’t, so I haven’t heard their reasoning or details myself, so eventually she went ahead and made the changes. I’m not adverse to the changes – but it does bother me a bit that noone seems to have asked me, that noone seems to have checked in with me about this. While I and her talked about it, noone else talked to me about it. Which is a but funny – and not in the haha-funny way. I don’t have beef with her now, but I wonder how much they will allow her to make changes on her own that affects me and the kids, without ever talking to me. That is the unsettling part.

As for myself, I’m slowly moving on to new territories. Because of the plague – if I’m allowed to use that word – everything goes so slowly. The Wheels of the Machinery turns very slow due to that, so everything gets old before next step comes along. It gets tedious, but it is what it is.

Oh, by the way – Wheels of Time on Amazon seems to release November 19th! I am so excited!