Completed: Submerged

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I just finished Submerged – I don’t exactly know where or how I got it, but it was in my Steam library and sounded interesting. I played around 3.5h and got 5 out of 10 Achievements, when I finished the main story, all that’s left would be some discovery and I’m not sure I want to do that.

Submerged is a third-person combat-free game in which you explore a mysterious flooded city.

So the exploration is nice, you move around on your boat, then scale buildings and find stuff, so far so good.

My main problem is while the game is not linear at all – you can go in any direction and each of the 10 things you need to find is progressing the story, but I don’t know why they thought it would be a good idea to teleport you back to your base when you found the thing, because this means you need to find all the hidden extras per building BEFORE you use the thing, which makes you needlessly backtrack. The game has a wonderful fast travel option back to base. Why not just a simple “do you want to fast travel back now? Y/N” instead of this?

You can also get some upgrades for your boat but it only enables you to use your speed boost for longer, and travel times are not a problem at all. So more like “find all of them for an achievement”. What would have helped is a sprint key while climbing, especially with the aforementioned backtracking. Also I find it very funny that the protagonist is a better climber than your toon in Assassin’s Creed, but you can’t jump over anything, even if it’s a a big step and if you are balancing across a plank you walk very slowly and awkwardly.

Graphics are fine for 2015, if somewhat repetitive, and hold up pretty well.

So much for the objective criticism, subjectively I didn’t like the story-telling in pictograms, I’m really bad with those, when I looked it up I only got like half of it. But it’s not really important, I guess.

Did I like the game? Yes and no. The problem is that it makes me want to play Assassin’s Creed now, and not their sequel, make of that what you want.

So, recommendation to buy it? No. Recommendation to play it when you get it in a bundle or something? Yes. It’s a short game, I don’t think you’d need more than 5h unless going for completion.

Ninja edit 2023-09-08: 100%ed it in an hour, finding most of the secrets on my own, grabbing a guide for the rest. Total time: 4.5h

Rise to Ruins Update 2

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Rise to Ruins is an awesome little indie game I bought in Early Access in 2017 and have since come back to play a round or two once in a while.

I’m not one to judge if a game is a classic X or Y with a twist, but you build a village, manage your resources, and at some point at night the monsters come, so you better be prepared and had some towers and walls built. Not strictly Tower Defense, but related.

It’s by no means a perfect game, but it doesn’t have a lot of game-breaking bugs (more like a few small irregular oddities) and some QoL things are missing, but you should absolutely buy it. I’m not saying that often because I suppose my taste in games is weird – but I fully support this game.

I hadn’t heard of this person before but I liked the review a friend linked me when I mentioned the game.

Apparently my timing was perfect because I had made a mental note to play it like a week ago and on August 26th a massive update had come out.

Splattercatgaming on Rise to Ruins

August in review

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Maybe I’m getting old and caving in to people’s trends, or maybe I’m just trying to learn from the insights and “month in review” posts make sense if you still have something to say that you already didn’t and don’t want a ton of mini posts.

Didn’t get a ton of gaming time in this month, summer has been great, I’ve been outdoors a lot despite no official vacation (except one day, iirc).

We played some WoW, killed the Raid Tier’s end boss on Heroic, have since been struggling to get enough people together for a reclear for the people who missed it (but those also didn’t show up consistently, so maybe only half-way bad form?) but otherwise I’ve ignored it. Logged in a couple of times to grab some achievements or just to relax and do some weeklies, mostly ignoring alts. Refreshing to be a casual for a few weeks!

The 14d free login event in FFXIV came and went and I did put in some hours, but I think I didn’t stress it overly much. I kinda planned to resub directly afterwards, but life got in the way, so I’m holding off until I am needed to tank or heal some Stormblood story dungeons, probably soon-ish.

Then I was craving something different and played a couple games of Stellaris, which was usually a full evening. I suck at it but I like the game. Dug out Age of Wonders III again to see if I might be interested in Planetfall, which was (maybe still is) on sale at the time. But I’m still not feeling it. AoW always teases me with looking and superfluously being like Heroes of Might and Magic, but something is off. PF could be different enough because it’s in space, but i doubt it. I still don’t see them as 4X games for the most part. Might try Civ VI that I found in my library, probably from Epic.

Oh and Blaugust – I managed to keep up with some reading in the first half of the month, not so much in the latter. Discord looked busy though, good times.

Some FFXIV levels were gained

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The free login campaign is pretty good, I’ve been playing most days since I started. Got about 7 levels on Black Mage and not really having a ton of fun, but I want to progress…

Made about three levels on Dragoon, it’s more fun but not the focus, mostly Tribal Quests, and finally some levels on Sage, which is not my favourite healer, but the last one below 90, and it’s okay. closing in on Level 80.

Also spent my tomestones on the Warrior Relic Weapon (Tier 1) instead of upgrading the Bard’s Bow, but grabbed a couple cheap iLvl 640 weapons from the market board.

Not sure if I am missing something but leveling seems hard. I don’t like the deep dungeons so it’s just duty roulette and a few FATEs. Not so quick and not so fun, but it’s working out at a steady pace.

Again, not really sure if I want to continue after the free login campaign is up – although it’s been really fun. But if I’m trying to think about what I like about this game… it’s apparently not “bringing the last few jobs up to max level” and it’s also not “gearing up via Alliance Raids”. I think I’ll make time to resub a week or two before the next expansion launches, get to max level in my own pace, hopefully play with my FC, and do the normal raid, then level 2-3 more jobs I actually like. (I suppose this is BRD > WAR > WHM/AST > DNC > PLD/DRK > GNB).

Aberrus – week 11 & 12

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Week 11 was a quick clear of the first 7 bosses and then 3 wipes on Neltharion (as usual), then a clean oneshot on Tuesday and on to Sarkareth. Three bad pulls, six semi-ok pulsl in P3, then 3 pulls below 20%, including our new best 11%.

Week 12 – Sunday. We decided to go the skip route, so boss 1 & 8, then the last boss. Boss 8, Neltharion, gave us some headache today again. Three wipes that were worse than usual, but then it worked. On to the last boss. One 33% wipe without Vantus runes, then off to our break. Came back from the break, someone had bought Vantus runes… and the boss just fell, on the 50th pull or so. One person died, nothing spectacular. Kinda underwhelming because it wasn’t close at all. Now we just need one reclear for our 2nd main tank, who is on vacation… and he already missed one of the last tiers’ end boss, just the worst timing.

Anyway, AOTC in Dragonflight Season 2.

So the real question for me and WoW (until the next raid tier) is now if I want to start doing M+ in earnest or leave it be.

One hundred thirty million

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Oops, forgot to post the last one. Last post in November.

Skill category             Points     No. of skills
===================================================
Spaceship Command         44,481,937  66 *
Gunnery                   20,895,798  43 *
Drones                    11,904,316  22 *
Missiles                  10,779,768  25 *
Navigation                8,606,589   13
Engineering               7,109,669   15 *
Fleet Support             5,532,130   13 *
Shields                   4,339,138   12 *
Subsystems                4,096,000   16
Electronic Systems        2,863,220   14
Targeting                 2,660,841    8 *
Armor                     2,609,805   11 *
Scanning                  1,899,374    7
Neural Enhancement        964,550      5 *
Resource Processing       902,450     10
Rigging                   679,060     10
Science                   502,275     13
Social                    434,510      6
Planet Management         394,040      4
Trade                     359,530      8
Production                276,743      4
Structure Management      135,765      1
Corporation Management    250          1

* = changes since last time

Skills at Level 5:   142 (+17)
Skills at Level 4:   123 (+1)
Skills at Level 3:    37 (-10)
Skills at Level 2:     3 (+1)
Skills at Level 1:    22 (-2)
Skills at Level 0:     1 ( 0)


And thus my alt has reached 80m.
Skill category             Points     No. of skills
===================================================
Spaceship Command         21,813,152  53 *
Gunnery                   11,889,507  36 *
Missiles                  7,333,279   21 *
Engineering               6,762,040   14 *
Drones                    6,704,925   17 *
Navigation                4,548,550    9 *
Subsystems                4,096,000   16 *
Armor                     3,810,275   10 *
Shields                   3,103,060   10 *
Electronic Systems        2,985,495   13 *
Science                   1,537,415    3 *
Targeting                 1,521,805    8
Scanning                  1,006,354    7 *
Fleet Support             889,570      6 *
Neural Enhancement        738,275      4
Rigging                   679,060     10
Planet Management         394,040      4
Resource Processing       33,000       3 *
Structure Management      24,000       1
Social                    23,072       4
Trade                     12,244       3

* = changes since last time

Skills at Level 5:   107 (+26)
Skills at Level 4:   103 (-9)
Skills at Level 3:    24 (-8)
Skills at Level 2:     8 (-2)
Skills at Level 1:    10 (-1)
Skills at Level 0:     6 (-2)

As there are no caps here, it’s a massive spike to get skills to Level V. 80m is really a comfortable place to be if you don’t “waste” skills anywhere except flying subcaps, espcially if you leave out the big Battleships, and their T2 variants.

Human Heritage Armor

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The Heritage Armor for Orcs and Humans came out in 10.0.7 in March and I had only done the Orc one (and liked it a lot). Today I had time and remembered that I was still missing the Human one. Can’t say how long it took but I liked it. If my Human character had been any other class than a Rogue I might even transmog it, but maybe I can use some parts…

When I last made a consolidated list about all the races in February 2020 there were still some missing, especially as I hadn’t leveled all Allied Races to max level, but if I am not mistaken now it’s these:

  • Troll
  • Undead (should be in the next Patch)
  • Night Elf (should be in the next Patch)
  • Draenei

Getting back to FFXIV?

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FFXIV has another free login campaign, this time 14 days, until the end of the month.

I last played in November last year, that should have been patch 6.2 and before I saw this yesterday I didn’t think about it too much, and had also ignored Fanfest and hadn’t even thought about what they might have announced. Turns out the next expansion is not planned for exactly 2 years after the last, but for next summer, Kaylriene has a blog post about it.

So, for some reason I am interested and I might just take them up on the offer, there are patches 6.3 and 6.4 to look at.

Aberrus – week 9 & 10

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I missed the Tuesday raid in week 9 but they did not kill Sarkareth. Don’t remember if we managed 8 or just 7 on Sunday, doesn’t really matter anyway.

Sunday in week 10 had us down a few key people and so we missed the 8/9 by maybe one pull or so, but for dragging along someone who only had done Normal once it went fine. (The person knows how to play, does a lot of M+, but we still lost some minutes by explaining every boss briefly, no blame here.) Tuesday was a quick kill of Neltharion and then a lot of tries on Sarkareth – some bad ones, but also quite a few good ones, one at 15% – should be doable.

After the Sunday raid I got dragged into a +20 Freehold, and I don’t know why. Guess they were already sure they wouldn’t time it and so it didn’t matter 😀 That was my 2nd M+ run in that dungeon, but hey, we did it – overtime with dozens of deaths. Kinda curious about the Vault loot next week now.