Category Archives: Forza

January in Review

The Site

Well, I got this achievement at least.

They said I had a satanic streak…

Otherwise is was mostly life as usual for the blog. WordPress.com broke links, waffled about it for a couple of days, then fixed them again. Pretty good for them, as they still sort of worked while they were broken.

And then there was the ad revenue. This month the site served up more ads than ever, coming close to 125K ads displayed compared to 99K last month. However, revenue was down. December’s 99K ads were worth a little over $23, while the 125K ads this past month were worth just about $16. Ad quality clearly plays into the revenue side of things, and I didn’t get high quality ads this time around. Still, $16 keeps me on track to pay the annual hosting for the blog at the Premium service level, which runs $99 a year.

One Year Ago

For my new year’s post I chose to ask questions rather than make predictions. I’ve always been told that there are no bad questions, though that statement usually precedes attempts to prove it wrong.

I also reviewed the games I played in 2020 and attempted to guess what I might play in 2021.

Twitch told me what I watched there in 2020 and I did that Quantic Foundry gamer profile thing again.

SuperData Research also did their review of 2020 which, along with its penultimate monthly chart, as their end was on the horizon.

There was that GameStop stock craziness.

I wrote a timeline of SOE/Daybreak Games.

The Steam Winter Sale ended with awards and stats.

I was wondering what LOTRO needed, since it clearly needed something.

People were wondering when we were going to get Burning Crusade Classic, with the current rumor being early May, which seemed too early to me. But we ended up getting it in early June, so I guess it wasn’t that far off.

The instance group was still working on Blackrock Depths, this time for a love potion. Then we went off to Dire Maul East for a change of scenery. Dire Maul North proved too much for just the four of us. We also hunted for recipes out in the Burning Steppes. Meanwhile, my paladin was catching up to the group in levels.

And then there was World War Bee, which kicked off the new year with the another huge titan battle, though this time the results were much more one-sided. The war bullet points:

Somewhere along the way I hit a year in KarmaFleet and the 230 million skill point mark.

There was also more binge watching and we had HBO max finally, so I took a look at it and its app.

And, finally, January 20th was a happy day.

Five Years Ago

As with most years here at the blog, it began with predictions.

Nintendo was telling us all about the Switch console, due in March.

I barely had predictions post before Daybreak announced they were closing Landmark, ticking one off the list for me. That got people freaked out about other Daybreak titles, so I reviewed the list.

That also led me off onto a semi-sarcastic rant about an EverQuest successor.

It was also high noon for Asheron’s Call and Asheron’s Call 2.

With a new iPad I lost all my progress on Candy Crush Saga, so forswore the title forever.

I was also tallying up the results of my purchases from the Steam Winter Sale. I don’t get why people like Stardew Valley so much. Just not my thing I guess. I did play a stretch of Train Valley however.

The long mansion road project was starting to hit home with me, but I kept on moving forward village by village.

In EVE Online I hit the 170 million skill point mark. All those skill points and I still don’t use my capital ships. After a false start we got the first update of YC119. It had music. It was also the kick off of the CSM election season.

In null sec there was a big battle at F4R2-Q that seemed to herald a new war. However coordination problems with the local defenders saw us pulling back to Catch.

And in Diablo III we were waiting for the Darkening of Tristram event. I ran through it quickly once, and then again to get some more achievements. It was kind of neat, but it wasn’t the original Diablo.

Ten Years Ago

I asked 12 questions for 2012. Some of those questions are still pretty legit. I also did what was for a while the annual LEGO minifigure round up.

I updated the About Page to its “Infrequently Asked Questions” format. Has it really been like that for five years already? It is probably due for an update.

There was that whole SOPA thing. We still live in peril of its return.

I struck a couple of games from my watch list, as it seemed I would never go back to play them again.

I bought an iPad for our cats… judging by the pictures.

LEGO Universe joined the ever increasing list of departed MMOs when its free to play conversion failed to save it from extinction.

SOE gave us the subscription matrix for the EverQuest free to play transition. As part of that conversion, EverQuest Mac was targeted for extinction as well. (Spoiler: It survived… for a while) Meanwhile, somebody had an EverQuest cocktail shaker on eBay.

Prompted by comments from others, I asked why those who sought an old school MMO experience were not out playing Vanguard.

Blizzard said they were going to be too busy in 2012 for a BlizzCon. Speaking of Blizzard, I hit level 85 at last in WoW. And then there was a panic about Diablo III maybe launching in February. (It didn’t)

Turbine announced that their fall LOTRO expansion would be Riders of Rohan.

There was an odd divergent current about Star Wars: The Old Republic, with some declaring it dead already (one month in) while others were still in “best game ever” mode. My favorite (now deleted, but still on the Internet Archive) angry post called it a hate crime.

I was starting to moan… more loudly… about how free to play makes an MMO focus heavily on cash shop content… to the detriment of the game in my opinion. This was prompted, no doubt, by those wings. Smed, on the other hand, was very happy about free to play.

In EVE Online the war against White Noise came to a close, leading to a quiet time in the north. But a conflict with Raiden was looming. during the lull, I recalled my first PvP death in EVE and celebrated that Garde drones now actually went *pew* *pew*. Boring no more!

In Rift, the instance group was kicked off its server. We regrouped on a new server. We were also warming up and starting to work as a group again in the Iron Tombs and the Darkening Deeps. That last was a struggle.

The Type 59 tank was pulled from the cash shop in World of Tanks.

And, finally, there was Pop Muzik.

Fifteen Years Ago

I wrote 59 blog posts, which remains a monthly record here at TAGN. Of course, that was before Twitter, so I was more likely to do shorter posts. If I had the patience I would track the average word count per post per month over the life of the blog to see how I changed from short posts to more of a long form/long winded approach.

I gave a brief recount of 2006 in what I find is my first high/low post on the blog. I had forgotten that I had done that post. I also uninstalled some games I was no longer playing. I was also looking forward towards Lord of the Rings Online.

The MMO blogesphere starting talking about generations of MMOs, and I asked if we had even gotten past the first generation, then quoted Wikipedia’s take on the generation debate.

The instance group in World of Warcraft finished up the Scarlet Monestary and rolled through Razorfen Downs.

Blintz, my fae swashbuckler in EverQuest II was just digging into Zek, The Orcish Wastes, one of my favorite zones in post-cataclysm Norrath, as well as hunting for Blood Talon in order to get my dwarven work boots.

Scott Hartsman described some of the goals for the EverQuest II expansion that would eventually become The Rise of Kunark. I also discovered that Sony slipped a promo for the Transformers movie in with the Echoes of Faydwer installation. That was back when SOE was under Sony Pictures.

I played in some of the Vanguard open beta, once I got it downloaded. The team was still working on a lot of polishing and features. The launch date was announced somewhat late, but when the game actually launched (on the same day as the much maligned Microsoft Vista), I declined to buy the box even though it was on Station Access. I thought one of the game’s potential flaws might be the inability to make a “hot” character. A female half-elf was the best I could manage. The character models were not pretty despite a profusion of sliders and options in the creation process.

Blizzard launched The Burning Crusade without the usual first day disasters that generally accompanied expansions back in the day, though I couldn’t figure out why I bothered to buy a copy. I was wondering how long it would hold its $40 price tag. It stayed at that price for quite a long time. These days we sometimes get a discount before a game even goes live.

Given that expansions were on my mind, I was wondering what the best timing for expansions really was. EverQuest was still doing two a year back then, while Blizzard took more than two years to get to its first one.

I gave a brief review of Massive Magazine issue #2.

And I found that SOE had provided the industry standard definition for the word “soon.”

Twenty Five Years Ago

The original Diablo shipped, stirring up a new genre in its wake, the ARPG. You can still find a playable version of the original at GoG.com.

Thirty Years Ago

Atari Corporation, as it then existed, dropped production, sales, and support for the Atari 2600, the Atari 7800, and the Atari 8-bit computer family. The 2600 series was supported for 15 years from launch, and has since been renewed in emulators in software and hardware form many times.

Forty Years Ago

Sega launches Zaxxon, with modeled a 3D environment with an isometric perspective and was, as I recall at the time, amazing looking. I could just sit and watch the demo run in the arcade.

Most Viewed Posts in January

Search Terms of the Month

goonswarm propaganda best
[I mean, it is pretty damn good at times]

eve fax
[Yes, though without the special paper]

eve minokawa
[See ‘eve fax’]

r-arkn aom keepstar
[Not anymore]

usnavy marauders
[Those are not like EVE Online marauders]

Game Time from ManicTime

The month saw New Eden back on top as I ran the Doctor Who event to see what it was all about. I had a bit of a Stellaris binge and EverQuest II were not far behind.

EVE Online – 26.29%
Stellaris – 22.95%
EverQuest II – 21.56%
Pokemon Pearl – 19.10%
New World – 9.11%
Forza Horizon 4 – 0.66%
World of Tanks – 0.34%

EVE Online

Things continue to churn in New Eden. Even in peace there is always some destruction and drama going on. I saw somebody complaining on /r/eve that null sec wasn’t warring hard enough to keep them entertained, but we blew up and looted a staging Keepstar that might have been the biggest loot pinata in video game history. You just can’t please some people.

There was also the Doctor Who event, which I ran through. I’ll have a write up on it as it ends at downtime tomorrow. Safe to say, like the game itself, it had its ups and downs and was likely inscrutable to any outsider.

EverQuest II

I hit the level cap again playing through the Visions of Vetrovia expansion. It actually wasn’t that hard, as I wrote late last week. It was, however, very much an EQII experience, which is neither a good nor a bad thing necessarily, but it is a thing. I also managed to touch very little of the actual expansion content, because the game is focused on instanced play. However, they do tend to offer solo versions, so there is still more to explore.

Forza Horizon 4

Some driving was indeed done, but I have hit a point where I got the driving need out of my system for a bit and where I have done a lot of the easy things in the game and the map is such a mess of things to do now that when I do log in I spend too much time trying to figure out where I should even go next. And then I drive around way too fast and crash through fences, hedges, trees, and whatever else gets in my way. At least that never gets old.

New World

The holidays finally ended there last week. Some people leave the tree up too long I think. The groups spent a few play sessions trying to get to the next dungeon in the game, the one at level 35. We’re not exactly speeding out way through the game, but we’re not in a big hurry either.

Pokemon Shining Pearl

I made it through to the Elite Four and defeated Champion Cynthia, thus pretty much completing the central story of the game. But, in Pokemon, there is always more to be done. I still have more to catch before I can even begin to claim I have caught them all.

Pokemon Go

Another month climbing the long, long road to level 50. I didn’t really do much out of the ordinary, a few raids, spun a Pokestop daily, and managed to get in one of the local gyms to earn some coins regularly. I also managed to miss a day and got my daily catch and daily spin cycles out of sync, which always annoys me. But I have them aligned again now.

Level: 42 ( 19w.7% of the way to 43 in xp, 4 of 4 tasks complete)
Pokedex status: 680 (+3) caught, 700 (+3) seen
Mega Evolutions obtained: 15 of 18
Pokemon I want: I need a Torkoal for my Hoenn Pokedex
Current buddy: Inkay

Stellaris

Having purchased some of the latest DLC for the game, I dove in and played. As I noted, I would consider it a classic “one more turn” game that can keep you up past your bedtime, but technically it doesn’t have turns. But it will keep you up late dealing with each new update or event that comes in. And if they’re coming in too slowly, you can just speed the game up.

World of Tanks

I poked about in this for a bit at the beginning of the month, so I have some stats for 2022 I suppose. But once I got on the Stellaris binge in the evenings, my tank time sort of dried up.

Zwift

I have been at making sure I get on the bike 3-4 times a week. I think the fact that I post this here is a motivator because, even though I am sure I am the only one that pays attention to my numbers, that they’re out in the open makes me self-conscious about them.

As for distance, I have now essentially gone from our house, though Portland, Oregon, and just over the Columbia river into Washington state.

Level – 12 (+0)
Distanced cycled – 684.5 miles (+100,1 miles)
Time – 1d 12h 8m (+5h 12m)
Elevation climbed – 29,501 (+5,088 feet)
Calories burned – 22,811 (+3,385)

Coming Up

We’re already a month into 2022 and, while it is cliche to say so, what the hell? Time goes by too fast.

February should bring us the Activision Blizzard Q4 2021 and 2021 overall financials. We’re all eager to see that I am sure… though with Microsoft buying them, I am not sure how much they really matter anymore. And once Microsoft swallows them I doubt they’ll be more than an obscure line item on the MSFT financials. Enjoy it while it lasts I guess.

Daybreak has a few things going on, including an odd new Lore & Legend special server for EverQuest II and a 64-bit upgrade for EverQuest. Also, they’ll no doubt be picking the EverQuest Community Resource Council, but that is all hush hush.

Guild Wars 2 has the End of Dragons expansion slated to launch last I checked, and it will include fishing. So keep an eye open for that.

Forza Horizon with a Controller

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Playing Forza Horizon 4 & 5 on the PC with the keyboard comes with its own special challenges, which I have mentioned in previous posts. But, to summarize, there are no half measures on the keyboard. If you press the W key for the throttle, it is full throttle. If you press S to brake, it is slamming on the brakes. And steering is a an exercise in yanking the wheel all the way in one direction or another and then letting go.

Forza Horizon 4

Which honestly isn’t as bad as it sounds. I played Mario Kart on the DS, which had just a d-pad for steering and a button for acceleration and did well enough, learning the “Mario Kart tap” method to stay on course. But Forza Horizon has been designed with analog input in mind, so while I wasn’t horrible at the game, and did improve over time, the keyboard as a controller was always going to be a barrier. Drifting, for example, requires a subtlety of control not possible with the keyboard, so far as I can tell… though we cannot discount me simply being bad.

Analog sticks, with their variable range of input, make a difference… or such was my theory.

I have/had a UBS game pad controller around the house somewhere, a Logitech Dual Action that was $4.99 back in 2011 when the offer for it came up. I used it a couple of times over the years, but with no great success. And, since I couldn’t find it after some desultory searching, I decided to buy a new game pad. XBox compatible seemed to assure compatibility with Windows, so I went to Amazon and…

Well, there are a lot of choices, enough to thwart any decision on my part. I faced the paralysis of too many choices and not enough information.

And then Belghast tweeted something a few days later recommending the 8BitDo SN30 Pro+ Blluetooth gamepad being on sale at Amazon and I jumped on that, getting the black model.

The gamepad in question

Since it was already December, this became a gift from my wife under the tree, to match the Lancome La Vie Este Belle gift set she bought as a present that I could give her. This is sort of where things end up after 25 years together, though we both still cheated and bought something else for each other, as we do every year.

Anyway, once I had the time to play with my gift, I got it connected to my system via Bluetooth and Forza Horizon 4 recognized it right away when I launched it. So off I went, to try driving with a controller.

And boy did I suck.

Imagine that, a new controller didn’t magically make me better at the game. In fact, it made me quite a bit worse.

The thing is, there were bad habits to unlearn.

When you’ve been playing on the keyboard with its binary on/off control mode you have no opportunity to learn any finesse in control, or at least not the control that an analog input gives you. So it took a couple hours of play to learn to not just jam the throttle all the way down with the R2 button and to not just jam the left analog stick back and forth to its extreme positions while driving.

And then it took a bit longer to grow past my abilities with the keyboard while using the controller. But it wasn’t bad. I was already used to driving wildly off the road, through trees, fences, hedges, front yards, construction sites, and whatever other bits of destructible terrain was in the game. Forza Horizon supports bad game skills quite well really.

So learning some control meant playing no worse that I was used to playing and occasionally getting better.

It was also nice to see how transparently the game moves from controller to keyboard input, depending on what I am doing. There are still some things that are easier done on the keyboard. Sometimes it is just quicker to reach up and hit the big Enter key that try to remember which key I need on the controller.

The physical controller itself is nice and solid, if a bit small for me. I have big hands, so it isn’t like that doesn’t apply to almost any gamepad I pick up. As I have said in the past, I thought the Wii Remote system was kind of goofy, but it was very good for a big guy like me.

The only odd or objectionable thing about the unit is that, unlike the pictures of it I have included above, which came from the 8BitDo web site, the markings on my controller are completely unreadable. They are flat black characters in a black font on a black background that it the same texture, lettering or not. If I hold the controller under a very bright light at an angle I can see lettering in the light reflected off of the places where there is supposed to be writing, though it is still too much black on black to discern what any given section is supposed to say.

I thought for a while that maybe the unit I got was missing its face plate. But, as I noted, I could discern writing under close, well lit examination.

This was actually a bit of a problem for me for a while, as I don’t use a controller very often, so I had to put up a key layout on my second monitor until I got used to where they buttons were.

Still, if I were to buy another one, I might opt for one of the models in a lighter color with dark lettering.

Anyway, I now have a controller to play Forza Horizon, and it has made me a bit better at the game. I still haven’t figured out drifting, but you cannot expect hardware to perform miracles I suppose.

The End of the Steam Winter Sale with 2021 Stats and Awards

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The Annual Steam Winter Sale wrapped up about fifteen minutes ago, if this post went live when I scheduled it. I sometimes mess that up, so one can never be too sure.

The Tradition Continues

As with last year, I ended no new games. I bought a few things during the summer sale, but when it came to winter I wasn’t able to warm up to anything sufficiently. I did buy some of the DLC for Stellaris that was discounted, so I didn’t walk away completely empty handed. But, in the end my current policy of “don’t buy it now if you’re not going to play it now” won out.

So not much of a story to tell there.

But Valve has some stuff for me to talk about. They did their usual “Best Of” post for 2021 that detailed what did well on the platform over the past year. (The blog has links back to past years if you are interested.)

On top of the revenue chart were the following 12 games, sorted alphabetically because they don’t give you actual numbers by which to sort them:

Apex Legends
Battlefield 2042
CS:GO
Dead by Daylight 5
Destiny 2
Dota 2
Grand Theft Auto V
Naraka: Bladepoint
New World
PUBG Battlegrounds
Rainbow Siege 6
Valheim

Some of the old familiar Valve titles made it, including Dota 2 and CS:GO, along with the aging champion Grand Theft Auto V, which will seemingly never die. But it was nice to see 2021’s surprise hit, Valheim, make the cut, as did New World. Two titles I actually played!

Perennial Platinum finisher Warframe remained in the Gold category for 2021, which still shows it to be a strong game. Also in Gold were both Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5.

When it came to the Most Played category, nine titles managed to exceed the 200K concurrent player count to make it into the Platinum rank for 2021. They were:

Apex Legends
CS:GO
Cyberpunk 2077
Dota 2
Grand Theft Auto
Halo Infinite
New World
PUBG Battlegrounds
Valheim

Again, it probably helps to be a Steam exclusive, but that category is pretty wide, with some of the titles closing in on a million concurrent at times.

And then there were the Steam Awards for 2021, the categories and winners of which were:

Game Of The Year: Resident Evil Village
VR Game Of The Year: Cooking Simulator VR
Labor Of Love: Terraria
Better With Friends: It Takes Two
Outstanding Visual Style: Forza Horizon 5
Most Innovative Gameplay: Deathloop
Best Game You Suck At: Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition
Best Soundtrack: Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy
Outstanding Story-Rich Game: Cyberpunk 2077
Sit Back And Relax: Farming Simulator 22

I voted in the award, though given what I play, it was generally a matter of guessing who would win rather than voting for anything I played. Valheim was a nominee in a category or two, but did not make the cut. So the only winner that I played was Forza Horizon 5, which I did indeed vote for.

But I also voted for Cooking Simulator VR and that was just me picking the silliest title on the list of VR options.

Anyway, the sale has come and gone, the records have been declared, and the award have been given out. Back to whatever passes for normal, at least until we get to the summer sale.

December in Review

Looking Back at 2021 Highs and Lows

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I think the best we can say about 2021 was that at least it wasn’t 2020 all over again.

2020 plus 1

Well, maybe that isn’t being fair, but after the eternity of 2020 and the election and the pandemic and staying at home, hearing that we were going to have a vaccine and a boring old guy as president gave us hope for some normalcy.

And then shit happened and I am worried I have reached that point in life where everything is just going to be worse every year. But we’ll get to that. First the usual round up of past years, because this in an annual thing and has been since been for more than a decade.

This year we are back to highs and lows, divided up into categories based on some criteria that represents how my brain sorts things or relevance to the theme of this blog or something like that.

Blizzard

Highs

Burning Crusade Classic launched, keeping the nostalgia party going
Diablo II Resurrected landed on PC and consoles to popular acclaim
Some actual serious talk about doing more with Diablo II Resurrected
We got another run at nostalgia with WoW Classic Season of Mastery
BlizzConline was a nice, solid online event that was FREE to all fans
Hearthstone carried on and came out with a new solo mode
The WoW Community Council could help things if Blizzard deigns to listen

Lows

There was the collapse of the WoW Shadowlands expansion as people lost interest and exited the WoW for greener pastures
I am pretty sure the big level squish was a sign that Blizz just wants people to get to level cap raiding faster rather than any attempt to make that between content more viable or accessible
Diablo IV is still more than a year away
Diablo Immortal, which they were letting people play at BlizzCon 2018, still didn’t ship
Overwatch 2 seems to be some sort of unsubstantiated myth at this point
StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm are on a shelf in the back room
No new WoW expansion announced… or any real tangible public plan for the one franchise that pays the bill
Tainted the Burning Crusade Classic experience with the bonus pack, with the lizard mount and special hearthstone that mostly marked people out for scorn, though I am sure it made money in the short term
So far the WoW Community Council has been a game of Space Invaders, where suggestions are the descending aliens that Blizzard feels they have to destroy before they get too close
And then there was the State of California lawsuit about Blizzard being a hostile work place, which seemed supported by some accounts even as Blizzard tried to deny there were any problems at the company, which then exploded as more and more revelations about the company were exposed, often supported by the social media accounts of the people who were the problem, aided and abetted by senior management and HR who all seemed eager to cover up and excuse bad behavior, tarnishing everybody from Mike Morhaime forward
Lots of empty promises to clean things up while ignoring employee issues and making sure to jump on top of any hint of a union with the usual round of anti-union lies
Eventually there was some cleaning out of those most obviously complicit, but the company was at odds with itself and began to drift like a ship without a rudder as those in the executive suite made sure that they were not held accountable for anything; leading by example is the most basic form of leadership and Bobby Kotick can’t even manage that
As bad as Blizzard and Activision corporate behavior has been, I bet only a small sliver of their fans would even care if the studio actually shipped something new and fun

Enad Global 7

Highs

2021 opened with such optimism about what EG7 was going to do now that it had acquired Daybreak
Then CEO Robin Floodin seemed eager to invest in the Daybreak portfolio, though he seemed oddly obsessed with H1Z1
Even replacement interim EG7 CEO and former Daybreak CEO Ji Ham admitted that the Daybreak portfolio of games had been neglected during his time as leader of Daybreak
We got to see Ji Ham speak and, while he wasn’t a font of insight, he did okay for his first public engagement as CEO of a public company
Ji Ham actually admitting on camera that Daybreak had not been investing enough in their game portfolio and saying that EG7 wanted to rectify that
New expansions for EverQuest, EverQuest II, and Lord of the Rings Online
Continuing new content for DC Universe Online and PlanetSide 2
MechWarrior 5 released on multiple platforms
Ongoing promise of a revamped LOTRO and a console version of the game
An unannounced Marvel IP MMO in development that got more headlines than anything Daybreak has done in the last five years
Daybreak taking over running Magic: The Gathering Online also put the company in the spotlight, adding another very visible franchise to their portfolio

Lows

Time and reality seemed to crush that initial wave of optimism that the acquisition instilled in us, as it tends to
Difficult to find anything real (as opposed to promised) where one can accurately declarre, “This is better today, right now, because of EG7” since the Daybreak acquisition
Worrisome feeling of deja vu when Ji Ham replaced the popular Robin Floodin as CEO
Some clearly impractical promises like LOTRO on consoles or bringing back H1Z1
Even the more practical promises are still out in the distant future
Really kind of business as usual for most of the games, which isn’t bad, but we were hyped for more

CCP

Highs

Opened the year with another Guinness Book World Record internet spaceship battle at M2-XFE
World War Bee proved once again that things happen in New Eden that no other game comes close to achieving
Lots of work on the whole new player experience thing and making things within the game more comprehensible
Came up with not bad solutions to the endless complaints about warp core stabilizers and interdiction nullification
Server upgrades to raise bar on performance in New Eden
Return of the Alliance Tournament

Lows

Economic starvation policy directly contributed to the stalemate that marked the last six months of World War Bee
The economy, the dull end of the war, and the COVID vaccine combined to slam the weekly peak concurrent user count
The promise of “prosperity” by CCP turned out to define “prosperity” as “more scarcity”
The CCP plan to make capital ships rare by making them expensive after years of them being way too cheap was both way too late to fix the proliferation issue and made capital pilots much less likely to risk their now very expensive hulls
The new player experience work has been focused pretty strongly on the initial tutorial, after which new players are still sent into the mediocre and now comically out of date career agents
Introduction of NFTs into the Alliance Tournament with the promise that this is just the start of those shenanigans
For some reason CCP can’t even ship what seems like a slam dunk improvement, like the new skill management interface, without screwing it up on the first pass and having to go back and fix blatant issues that were reported on the test server… and which should have been obvious to anybody with eyes honestly
UI design team philosophy seems to always default to “what if we added an additional UI pane to the game?”
I guess EVE Echoes is still a thing… oh, look, it has become a horrible, cash shop focused vision of what might be the future of the main game
Weren’t they working on a first person shooter or something?

Amazon

Highs

New World was an undisputed success at launch
Server queues are bad for players, but they are a good problem to have to solve when compared to server merges
Huge player numbers in the first month, with almost a million concurrent at its peak
Even when things died down, low six digit concurrent numbers are something many live games would kill for
Actually an MMORPG that felt different from the WoW-centric experiences we’ve been having the last fifteen plus years
Being skill and not class based means your character can do it all… theoretically
Planned for the future with a very obvious server merge path

Lows

When you’re getting 5 digit server queues with a game that has a low four digit player limit per server, you have not launched enough servers
So many bugs, so many problems that won’t go away, so much time spent waiting for the damn game to load
A lot of “nice to have” features left on the cutting room floor
You know “Azoth” makes half of us think of “Azeroth” every time we see that word
Some very odd UI design choices… beyond the clearly “designed for consoles” aspect even
An attempt to forestall players leaving made crafting and high end content so grindy it accelerated players leaving
In reality, I desperately want an alt so my main doesn’t literally have to do it all and respec with every change
Also, alts aside, two freaking character slots per region? I remember the EQII launch and being dismayed that they only gave us four character slots, and New World somehow topped that
Server merges already as it is a game that has a minimum population in order to be viable
Getting to the “so what are you going to do next?” phase in New World
Didn’t Amazon have some other games in development?

Pokemon

Highs

We finally got a remake of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl
A great Pokemon Go Fest back in July
Pokemon Go keeps adapting and getting better

Lows

We will see how well a faithful remake of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl plays in 2022 I guess
Pokemon Go Fest was largely a success because they cut the price down to something reasonable
Sitting at level 42 in Pokemon Go it looks like a long, long ways to level 50

Television, Books, and the Media

Highs

The binge watching continued into 2021 and there was a lot to watch
Some solid IPs hitting the airwaves with series based on The Wheel of Time and Azimov’s Foundation series
A new attempt at a Dune movie, as well as a new Bond and Matrix movies
Ghostbusters Afterlife was the sequel the original deserved
Actually went out to the movies a few times; the popcorn was excellent
Lots of new seasons for things we like previously
Managed to get through 28 books this year
I did a lot of podcast listening as well
Twitter remains a fairly hospitable place for me

Lows

The problem with binging TV is that you become very aware of the tropes of the genre and the clues indicating where the plot is going
A lot of what I call “next season” fatigue, where I find that shows I liked in past seasons don’t really live up
We watched such a breadth of shows that when a new season drops I cannot remember what the hell went on before
Some extremely crap “previously on X” 30 second recaps in front of a new season that don’t help at all
Not a lot of new movies interesting enough to risk going to the theater, and a couple I might have gone out to see were released simultaneously on streaming, and our couch at home wins by default even if the popcorn isn’t as good
The whole Dune “we’re hiding the fact it is only part one until you see the opening credits” thing bugged me
Bond should have stayed retired
A lot of my reading this year was re-reading books for comfort, so not a lot new managed to get on my list
A lot of what I call “podcasts” today, such as This American Life, I would have just called “shows on the radio” 15 years back, while I rarely if ever find time for the amateur affairs that represented podcasts back then

Blogging and Such

Highs

The blog, it lives still, fifteen years into the game
I once again posted more than once a day in 2021
For no good reason I have been on a post-a-day streak since April 2020, which puts me into the mid-600s for days in a row of posting
Blaugust was a thing again this year
The local blogging community still carries on

Lows

Finding something to write about that I also care to put the effort into… ideas are cheap and plentiful, time and enthusiasm are much more rare… is becoming more difficult
The backbone of the blog was MMORPGs, which lend themselves to blogging as they are very much progression based and tell the story of your character, and since I am barely playing any MMORPGs at this point, those tales of progression have largely gone missing
There is no feature that WP.com cannot screw up on the first three tries
WP.com tech support will tell you you’re wrong when you say they’ve broken something, then fix it two weeks later

Just Life

Highs

As I stated at the top, at least it isn’t 2020 anymore
Still hanging on; my wife and I combined made more money in 2021 than any year previous, so we’re not too worried about the immediate future and doing okay compared to many in these trying times
Managed to refinance our house, lower our monthly payment, and pull out enough cash to pay for the last two years of college for our daughter
Back to having a boring president is good for the blood pressure
Covid vaccines available for most everybody at this point; I got my booster just ten days back
Even Donald Trump says you should get vaccinated
Managed not to contract Covid myself yet
Going to the store was mostly back to normal, save for masks, and there was toilet paper and antiseptic wipes available
The news wasn’t one outrage or horror show after the another; we let things slide in 2020 that would have been headlines with two week life cycles in a normal year

Lows

2021 would seem like a pretty bad year if it hadn’t followed 2020
The price of the final two years of college for our daughter is easily going to get into six figures
Oh, and everything else is more expensive, so we’re not actually gaining any ground, just holding on
Everything is still worse than before Covid; prices are up, quality is down, portions are smaller, supply is unreliable, and the chip shortage remains
I didn’t catch Covid, but I got an inner ear infection that made me deaf in my right ear for about a month, and I have still not fully recovered my hearing there months later
Delta and Omicron variants have made it clear than Covid isn’t going away any time soon
Covid boosters are likely to become like flu shots, something we’ll need to get every year it seems, and masks in enclosed public spaces are going to be a thing for the rest of my life it seems
Apparently the ONE thing Donald Trump’s fans cannot abide is him endorsing Covid vaccines
We have reached a point where billionaires have their own space programs like Bond villains
I’ve really had trouble recalibrating to a news cycle that isn’t one insane thing after another, so when the top story of the day is about Biden’s dog or Kamala Harris buying cookware my gut reaction is “who gives a flying fuck?”
Remember when we were worried about Democracy in Hong Kong? Yeah, China stomped that idea out of existence
China is starting to seem impatient about bringing Taiwan under its control
Russia is still working on reconquering the old Soviet/Imperial Russian empire, with an invasion of the remaining unoccupied parts of Ukraine as a distinct possibility, and we know how well wars in Europe work out for everybody
Boring presidents don’t actually do much it seems, so the new James Buchanan we have now is just forestalling conflicts to come
The November 2022 elections could very well decide whether or not democracy is a thing in the USA
We’ll be close to 8 billion people on earth soon, well up from the 3.3 billion who were around when I was born; Thomas Malthus would be telling us, “told you so” if he were still around today

Anyway, I had better stop there before I get myself too down. Bad news does tend to push out anything good, so I should be happy that the bad news hasn’t been as frequent or as close to home.

Tomorrow is the last day of the year. Enjoy it. 2022 is coming, and I am sure it is keen to leave its own mark on our collective hides.

The Steam Winter Sale 2021 Has Begun

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The annual holiday tradition of video game discounts has arrive at Steam as they unleash the 2021 version of their Winter Sale.

The Tradition Continues

It seems to be off to as smooth of a start as one could expect. Often the first hour of the sale is a time to find mid-priced items and other oddities in the mix… not to mention some performance issues as people rush in to find that price typo that will get you a game for a fraction of its intended price.

If you were interested in Forza Horizon 4, which I have been writing about, it is available for $20 again as part of the sale, down from its $60 base price. Also on the list are New World for $30, Valheim for $15, and a host of other titles marked off at least a bit, even some new-ish titles like Age of Empires IV.

It is a chance to spend some of those Winter Sales tokens you may have saved up or earned on cosmetic items.

It is also your opportunity to vote in the Steam Awards. The Autumn Sale around Thanksgiving is when you get to nominate games and the Winter Sale is when you get to see who made the cut for inclusion. It will be a tough choice for Game of the Year for me as Valheim, New World, and Forza Horizon 5 are all on the list, and they all have their merits in my book.

The sale runs from today through January 5th, though you only have until January 2nd to vote as the sale will culminate with the announcement of the winners and all sorts of statistics about which video games did the best on the Steam platform in 2021.

And then it will be 2022 and we will have a whole new year to fret about.

Answers to My Questions for 2021

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Back at the start of the year I eschewed the usual predictions post and instead went in for a round of questions. After 2020 I was clearly feeling unprepared to predict anything, though this was not the first time I went down that path. Now we have hit the middle of December and it is time to see if any of my questions got answers we like.

2020 plus 1

There is a long pattern of me making such posts on the first of the year.

2008 – Predictions (silly, mostly wrong)
2009 – Predictions (mostly silly, mostly wrong)
2010 – Predictions (lots of bullet points, mostly wrong)
2011 – Demands (mostly unmet)
2012 – Questions (mostly unanswered)
2013 – Goals (mostly unfulfilled)
2014 – Predictions (serious, mostly wrong again)
2015 – Predictions (serious, mostly wrong as usual)
2016 – Predictions (serious-ish, mostly wrong)
2017 – Predictions (more wrong than usual)
2018 – Predictions (serious and maybe less wrong than usual)
2019 – Predictions (scandalous and mostly wrong)
2020 – Predictions (2020 made me so very wrong)
2021 – Questions (we’ll see how it goes)

Anyway, let’s get tucked in and see what I can come up with.

What will a return to normalcy bring to the video game industry?

Right off the bat I am going to have to object here to the assumption that we’ve returned to anything like normalcy. We’re not in 2020 anymore, but we’re not not in 2020 anymore either. The shadow of that year lay heavily over this one, its poison seeping in. People who can are still working from home, Covid is still spreading, the economy is still in a bind from the pandemic, and the world still seems to be going to hell at a rapid pace.

Will Shadowlands hold players?

Well, at least we have an easy one here. The answer is “no.” There are a few reasons, not the least of which is Blizzard not releasing much in the way of additional content and Blizzard being revealed as a nightmarish Dickensian workhouse of misogyny and intolerance. Also, maybe “run Torghast every day for the next two years” wasn’t the winning plan that somebody thought it was.

Will Diablo Immortal ship?

Another easy one! And another “no.” Wyatt Cheng once asked if we had phones. Many of us probably have new ones since he asked that question at BlizzCon 2018. Now does he have a game? That seems to be a more pertinent question at this point.

Does Blizzard have anything new planned?

Three for three here on the easy questions, with another big “no” on the tally. Diablo II Resurrected is about as “new” as they got, and they had Vicarious Visions do the remaster of a twenty year old title for that. It was a good remaster, but it wasn’t new.

Along with that we had Burning Crusade Classic and WoW Classic Season of Mastery, also not new. Even the solo mode for Hearthstone didn’t feel very new. I guess their bigger company issues got in the way for some of that, but it still feels like they came into 2021 just winging it and hoping something would come up. And, honestly, they don’t seem to have much lined up for 2022. How can such a big studio… more people work on WoW than most MMO studios have total employees… deliver so little?

What does Daybreak under EG7 really portend?

A reverse merger, with Ji Ham now at the helm? I wouldn’t have called that one. Otherwise there has been some promises for the future, but the first year really seemed like business as usual for Daybreak… except maybe they didn’t lay so many people off in 2021. That’s a plus.

Will Norrath continue to boom?

Kinda, maybe, sorta. As noted above, things were mostly business as usual. That has generally been good for the Norrath titles, EverQuest and EverQuest II, which get an expansion in November/December and a major content drop in late spring/early summer every year. So things roll on there.

But when it comes to doing anything new, it is LOTRO they want to put on consoles, DCUO they want to update, and an unannounced Marvel IP MMO that gets all the headlines. They even keep bringing up H1Z1. But EverQuest as a franchise? Any plans for that look to be dead.

What happens with H1Z1?

Nothing. As I wrote above, EG7 keeps bringing it up when they talk about the important IPs they control. There is clearly some wishcasting going on about the title returning to the top of the battle royale genre. But actual progress? There was some mention that they had a few people look into being able to run a build, but otherwise nobody appears to be working H1Z1 in any meaningful way.

At least they stopped renaming it I suppose.

Where is Cold Iron Studios?

Not with Daybreak and EG7, we know that much. Somewhere between the announcement that Daybreak was purchasing Cold Iron and the launch of their game Aliens: Fireteam Elite, Cold Iron went somewhere else. Details are hazy, the story is mostly inferred, but Cold Iron never made it into the EG7 stable of studios.

What does ArenaNet do after all the departures?

Pretend nothing has changed and announce an expansion? This is the problem with bringing up studios and games I do not watch closely. A bunch of key people left ANet last year, but back in August they announced the End of Dragons, slated for February 2022, so I guess everything is good. Maybe? I don’t really know.

Where does CCP go next with New Eden?

Nowhere? Seriously, after the Triglavian story cycle the company has been been focused on the new player experience and trying to force the in-game economy into a form that they believe is best for the long term survival of the game, ignoring the short term “hey, can you give us something fun?” requests from the players. Short sheeting the economy isn’t fun. Even if you don’t care about the economy and mock miners and industrialists who are complaining, you have to admit that there is very little fun in what CCP has been doing for the last year.

Will CCP stop strangling the New Eden economy?

No. There was a promise over the summer that the end of scarcity was coming. But the Q4 quadrant, New Dawn: Age of Prosperity, involved very little prosperity. For every relaxation of the economic restrictions there was some matching nerf to offset things, often hidden behind some oppressive new game mechanic. CCP said they were listening to feedback, but they mostly slowed their roll a bit (compression will be in 2022 now) and tried re-arranging the deck chairs some (“waste” got renamed to “residue”) as they carried forward with the goal of resetting the economy to some past halcyon state. I am sure this will end well.

How Will World War Bee End?

The side with the 3:1 numbers advantage got tired and went home.

There are many ways to spin who “won” the war. PAPI can claim that they forced the Imperium down from four regions to one constellation and destroyed trillions of ISK in ships and structures. The Imperium can claim that they held out, denied PAPI their stated victory conditions, and in the end destroyed as much in ships and structures as PAPI did.

As for losing the war, that award generally goes to the group that loses their space and has to move elsewhere. That makes Legacy Coalition, the main instigators of the war under Vily, the losers. TEST, the leading alliance in Legacy, lost their old space, couldn’t hold their new space, and ended up trying to live as far away from the Imperium as they possibly could. Brave gets a special mention for losing hardest of all, as not only did they lose their old space and their new space, but now the rest of PAPI is attacking them because Brave sold structures to the Imperium so they could at least asset safety their stuff and get some seed ISK in the bank to carry on.

Really though, the honor of ending the war goes to CCP. It was already somewhat obvious after the second battle of M2-XFE that their servers were not going to be up to a final mighty battle. And then CCP made changes to resources and production that made capital ships too valuable to expend freely, so the attackers were limited to subcaps. In the choice between investing a lot of time and effort in a real blockade of the final Imperium constellation or just going home, they opted to go home.

Will Nintendo announce a remake of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl?

Yes, goddammit, yes they did. About freaking time. And it has shipped and there is a copy for me and my daughter under the Christmas tree. We’ll see how that plays out soon enough.

Will crowd funded MMOs finally find their way?

Ha ha ha ha… no. I mean, Crowfall went live I think. I am not sure it will survive, but it shipped. And they are a stand out in the stable of crowd funded MMOs, which mostly promised things they couldn’t deliver. Don’t spend money on things that you cannot play today.

Project: Gorgon is the right path, as it was in playable form from the day of the first monetary ask. Camelot Unchained is the wrong path, asking for money, blowing through every promised date ever, and starting a new project before the promised one is even in beta. And then there is Star Citizen… well, they certainly know how to milk a community. Star Citizen is a lot of things, but being an actual video game seems to be a few bullets down the list.

Is there anything new possible for MMORPGs?

The metaverse maybe? That seemed to be the topic for 2021. I don’t know if it is Raph Koster’s desire to remake the simple days of MUDs in the 90s or Mark Zuckerberg’s dystopian vision of an all controlling metaverse that turns our very desires against us, but I guess either might be something new… at least for MMORPGs.

Oh, and something about crypto and NFTs. But we’ll probably burst that bubble in 2022.

Will I play anything new this year?

Valheim. That was a bit of a left field star, but ended up being our main game for about two months earlier this year. New World showed up and, once the initial chaos settled down, the instance group got into the game. And then there was Forza Horizon 4 & 5. Open world driving for the win. There were a couple of other small titles that were new, but nothing that I invested more than a couple of hours in.

That I played three new games made 2021 a departure from the usual routine. In 2020 80% of my game time was spent in WoW, WoW Classic, and EVE Online. The year isn’t over yet, but so far those three titles represent less than 50% of my tracked play time.

Will VR get a killer app this year?

Ha ha ha ha… no. VR will remain a niche so long as it requires a real world obscuring mask strapped to your face… oh, and the motion sickness issue gets addressed. Ready Player One and Zuckerberg’s idea that we’re all going to live in his ad laden VR metaverse hell is a pipe dream.

Will the industry be smart enough to keep regulators away?

Not really. The industry’s best defense so far has been regulators being interested in other things to further their own interests. It has to be a slow news day for lockboxes to make the headlines of late, so politicians and regulators have mostly been busy elsewhere. Except for Blizzard. Yeah, Blizzard is having some regulatory issues, though not over lockboxes and that sort of thing, just mundane things like running a hostile, discriminatory work place. The usual corporate thing.

But the industry keeps on trying to get the government to come down on them hard, with cryto and NFTs on their list of things to try next.

Will We lose Section 230 Protection?

Not yet, though Facebook seems to be pushing to have that taken away, because they have the money and the staffing to deal with any new regulations which would help them cement their place in creating our dystopian future… and present… and recent past.

What will I do when the blog turns 15?

Write a post about it. That is my answer for most things I suppose.

So that was the list for 2021. As those were just questions rather than predictions there is no score.

I think I’ll be able to warm up to doing some predictions for 2022. I have a couple of weeks to get on it. But first I need to make a 2022 graphic.

Forza Horizon 4 as a Destination Today

Forza Horizon in the UK

6 Replies

My experiment/investment in trying Forza Horion 4 has been something of a success… success being defined as having fun end basically enjoying myself.

Forza Horizon 4

My basic premise was that FH4 was similar FH5 with just a different setting, story, and a slightly different set of vehicles… which was just about right.

I can see why some people have been complaining that FH5 is a lot like FH4 because they are a lot alike. But they are not exactly alike, and having played the two back to back in a pair of two week sprints, I am perhaps well positioned to spot the differences.

The core of the game is the same… because why would you mess with that? And the differences, aside from the setting, can be a but subtle, but they are there.

To start with, it seems to take a while longer to get into FH4 and be unleashed on the open world core of the game. I am sure it felt even longer because I immediately wanted to jump into the menus to do things only to find most of they grayed out until I progressed far enough.

You also start with just one car, rather that the trio you get at the start of FH5, and I picked the 69 Dodge Charger, thinking I would get something more appropriate for the next race, only to find myself driving that through the whole intro to the game phase. That wasn’t horrible, but as a street racer the Charger is much better on the straight away than in any situation where lateral G forces come into play.

One of the reasons I wanted to get into the menus right away was that I hit Enter by mistake when customizing my license plate intially, so spent some time driving around with “WORIZON” on my back bumper.

Also visible, virtual Potshot… your XBox buddies show up

But it did get me into my initial game persona, which was that of the Kevin Kline character in A Fish Called Wanda, diving on the right side of the road in a big American car and shouting at the unwitting locals… because, being the UK, they’re all driving on the left, which was a bit more disorienting at first than I thought it would be. (I even found a black baseball cap to wear while I did this.)

Later on in another big American car… with corrected license plate

Eventually I got to the open world and was able to go freely about my business. The basics are the same, with the big map and all the things you can do, find, and race. There are some UK-centric items, like a race against a hovercraft (eel status: unspecified) or The Stig from Top Gear.

You even jump the hovercraft, because of course you do

And, of course, it isn’t Mexico, so there are a lot of forests and it snows. In facts, it seems to be stuck on winter for me most of the time. It occasionally switches to spring or autumn, but mostly it seems to be snowy, though at least that means I can drive across frozen lakes.

The levels and progression and what not, which I don’t fully understand and really can’t be bothered with most of the time, seems more complicated in FH4. It feels like they went through a streamlining process in developing FH5, which was probably a good thing… though, with both games, as you level up you map ends up becoming so cluttered it is hard to tell what is going on unless you use the filter… and know what it is you want to exclude.

Finally, I think the RNG in FH4 is against me. I suspect that somewhere in the code there is a statement like:

if (platform = Steam) {
wheelspin = Suxor;
}

or some such, because in FH5 the random Wheelspin give away was awesome. I won a lot of cars in it, and when I didn’t win cars I mostly won money with which I could buy cars. In FH4 the Wheelspin… and especially the Super Wheelspin… seem set on making me cry. I’ll see a bunch of awesome cars, some of which you can only get via a Wheelspin (or at the auction house), roll on by, but in the end the wheel will settle on cosmetics, horn sounds, or emotes.

Even my avatar is wincing at that result

In the end though, the game plays the same, which means I am not very good at it.

Part of that is because I have never been very good at driving games, and part of that is because I am playing with keyboard controls. When using the keyboard most controls, like the accelerator, are either completely off or, when pressed, opened up to the extreme.

Let me tell you about driving in snow when you can only stomp on the accelerator. That is its own flavor of wheel spin. Likewise, when every turn input is “crank the wheel hard” you start to appreciate long straightaways.

So, for me, a lot of the game is finding the right car and the right kind of events to run… or finding the wrong car and going very fast until I hit a sharp turn and Newtonian physics takes over and I slide through a hedge, a stone wall, some trees, and whatever else happens to be in my way, until I shed my velocity or run into something solid, like a building or mountain side.

And part of the point of my going to FH4 was to drive Italian and British (and a few French) vehicles. I had some good luck at first with the Fiat 131 and the Triumph TR6.

A clear race until we get to a corner…

But the car I wanted, the car that drew me to FH4 in the first place, was the Lancia Delta HF integrale Evoluzione. However, that wasn’t a car you could simply buy on the main market. In looking it up, I found you could only get it as a wheelspin prize… and you’ve seen my rant above about how well that has worked out for me.

But I did find it finally in the auction house, though there it is listed as the Lancia Delta S4, which is actually the Group B rally car version, which was totally what I wanted.

The auction house is… odd… and behaves like eBay in the old days, where somebody snipes your low bid at the last second of the auction. I can’t tell if sellers are working the system to bid up prices or if somebody just always wants when I have bid on exactly ten seconds before the end of an auction that has seen no bids at all, but the results are generally a loss for me.

So I just did a buyout on the cheapest one I could find on the auction house. I had my car.

The Delta S4 in a rally skin

And I was immediately disappointed.

I had, perhaps, built the car up a little too much in my head based on our Need for Speed: World shenanigans from a decade back.

Three in a row in NFSW

I had imbued it with an almost magical aura in my brain. But it isn’t Superman. It cannot do everything better than anything else on the road.

It is, however, a Group B rally car, so if you put it in the right race and handle it correctly, it can do great things. Not that I am claiming I know anything about handling the car correctly… my main plan coming into turns is generally to hit somebody else and bounce off in the right direction… but on cross country races I have been winning regularly against above average computer drivers.

I missed him, but still managed to make the turn

So the Lancia has been my go to vehicle as I run down the various off road and cross country races.

I still have a lot to explore in the game… it is jammed packed with things to do… and I keep telling myself I am going to settle down and concentrate and learn how to make car skins or do tuner upgrades… but then I log in and just drive around or race. Just driving can be quite relaxing as I listen to a podcast or an audio book.

I think, overall, FH5 is a slight improvement over FH4… and it seems to be easier to just go cross country in Mexico than in the UK… but they are so close that little things like the cars available can tip the balance.

Downgrading to Forza Horizon 4

5 Replies

One of the big complaints I have heard about Forza Horizon 5 since I started playing it last month has been that it isn’t very different from its predecessor, Forza Horizon 4, which also happened to be the first title in the series to be available on PC. [Edit: Or the first in the series available on Steam maybe, as I am informed FH3 was on PC as well.]

Forza Horizon 4

Now, since I have been enjoying FH5, hearing that FH4 is mostly the same stuff in a different setting seems like something of an endorsement. In fact, it was one of the first things I heard about FH5, such that before I even went down the XBox Game Pass route I checked out FH4 on Steam thinking that it might be cheaper, being the older title.

It was not cheaper. It was the same price, $59.99, as its younger sibling. Faced with that, I opted for the new title on the game pass.

And then Steam has a sale around Thanksgiving. Their autumnal sale. They have a sale for each season at this point, and some big sales events in between, no doubt to keep us all from simply waiting for the Winter and Summer sales, but those two tend to be the big ones in my mind, the Winter sale especially, which comes grouped with the Steam awards, the annual statistics at the end of the sale, and the holiday season when people tend to have some free time and are in a buying mood.

And, as part of the sale there was FH4 for just $20.

Now, I was already playing FH5 for a buck, at least until February, so it wasn’t like I was dying for, or even needed, another driving game, and especially one that is very much like the one I already had access to. But there was the whole renting versus owning… such that it is when we’re talking about software… plus the idea of not having to deal with the console-centric XBox Live software… that made me start to ponder it.

So I started looking into the differences. FH5 is set in Mexico, while FH4 is set in the UK. The list of cars that both offer is fairly comparable… again, one of the complaints I have heard… but as I was digging into the FH4 list I found it offered a wealth of British and Italian cars that FH5 had omitted.

And that kind of sold me. For a game like this, the cars are important, and once I get my fix of pre-2000 Nissan models… all of which are in FH4… Fiats and Lancias and Alfa Romeos along with an assortment of Triumphs and MGs are on my list. I mean sure, big American iron is on my list too, but my taste in style tend to run to the Italians at times.

I asked a couple of people about the title, then poked Potshot to see what he thought, and we both figured we should buy it.

And then, of course, I didn’t buy the $19.99 base option, but opted for throw in another fifteen bucks for the Ultimate Edition, which had been marked down from $99.99 to $34.99, and included all the car packs that had been added to the game, including a range of Hondas, Mistubishis, some Hot Wheels models, and the James Bond collection.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Potshot threw down for that as well.

Then came the big install, as another 100GB of data had to find space on my computer.

Of course, my desire to be rid of the XBox PC client was still thwarted. You don’t have to dive into it, but you do have to link your Steam account to your XBox PC account. The game won’t start until you do.

It wasn’t a horrible process… not as bad as trying to get from buying XBox Game Pass PC in the Microsoft Store then trying to get it setup outside of the store… but there was still some stupidity involved.

When asked to link your Steam account to your Microsoft account, my Microsoft account was actually presented in the dialog as an option. My PC is linked to that account through the OS as is the Microsoft Store and the XBox PC client. Linking the accounts should have been as simple as clicking on that account. But it wasn’t. For whatever reason, that was not allowed and I had to click on the “select account” option and then remember my password for the login, which is unique to Microsoft, so I never remember it.

And since I didn’t remember it I had to go to the password managed where I couldn’t find it because the URL for logging into your Microsoft account doesn’t have the word “microsoft” in it. Instead it is “login.live.com” because Microsoft secretly hates us.

Still, that was only a 10 minute frustration loop rather than the one hour loop with FH5.

But now I have it install and running and can compare the two. We shall see just how similar the two games are!

Meanwhile, the sale is over and FH4 is back up to being the same price as FH5. But the Steam Winter Sale will soon be upon us. The price might be $20 again soon.

Blizzard

Enad Global 7

CCP

Amazon

Other Areas of the Video Game Industry

Television, Books, and the Media

Blogging and Such

Just Life

What will a return to normalcy bring to the video game industry?

Will Shadowlands hold players?

Will Diablo Immortal ship?

Does Blizzard have anything new planned?

What does Daybreak under EG7 really portend?

Will Norrath continue to boom?

What happens with H1Z1?

Where is Cold Iron Studios?

What does ArenaNet do after all the departures?

Where does CCP go next with New Eden?

Will CCP stop strangling the New Eden economy?

How Will World War Bee End?

Will Nintendo announce a remake of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl?

Will crowd funded MMOs finally find their way?

Is there anything new possible for MMORPGs?

Will I play anything new this year?

Will VR get a killer app this year?

Will the industry be smart enough to keep regulators away?

Will We lose Section 230 Protection?

What will I do when the blog turns 15?