Time to Loot Journal: April 2023
I decided on my new monitor! I have it even. Arrived a week or so ago, and it is glorious. Last month I detailed the PC upgrade, but noted that I still had some thinking to do on the monitor. Ultimately where I landed was on the Samsung OLED G8 21:9 monitor. Full disclosure though if you’re also in the market for a monitor — I had access to a fairly substantial discount on the Samsung monitor in particular, and I might’ve made a different choice if I was comparing on RRP alone.
That caveat aside though, I’ve been really happy with it.
I was worried about both the reduced size vs. my previous 32:9 behemoth of a screen and the potential for text clarity issues on an OLED display, particularly for desktop/productivity usage.
But neither has been a significant issue. The size, not at all. I still feel I have plenty of desktop real estate to work with. Text clarity seems to only be an issue in rather specific circumstances. I did make a few adjustments to my blog text to help, as narrower characters seem to display the issue more prominently.
In other news, I did install ManicTime after realising my mistake. I’m fairly irritated at missing another month of tracking, to be honest. But ah well. Fixed now!
So!
Games Played April 2023
| Rank | Game | Hours | % Gaming Time |
| 1 | Warframe | 67.8 | 56.9% |
| 2 | Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order | 13.7 | 11.5% |
| 3 | Death Stranding Director’s Cut | 10.7 | 9.0% |
| 4 | Star Wars: Jedi Survivor | 7.0 | 5.9% |
| 5 | Cities: Skylines | 6.0 | 5.0% |
| 6 | Cyberpunk 2077 | 4.6 | 3.9% |
| 7 | Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II | 4.6 | 3.9% |
| 8 | World of Warcraft (Retail) | 3.7 | 3.1% |
| 9 | Forza Horizon 5 | 0.9 | 0.8% |
I was really enjoying Warframe, as you might be able to tell from the hours played. I was really enjoying it right up until The Duviri Paradox launched ironically, which was one of my main draws for going back in the first place.
Warframe
The single-player cinematic questline was… You know, it’s good. Nothing on the scale of The New War, but then I wasn’t entirely expecting that. So that’s OK. I enjoyed it while it lasted and was left wanting for more answers, absolutely. (e.g., not a single major plot point regarding The Man in the Wall? Seriously?)
But what ended up breaking the cycle of fun for me wasn’t the lack of answers. It was the bugs. The horrendous, game-breaking bugs, that are so frequent in occurrence there is no way QA didn’t pick them up. They just chose to go ahead and launch with them in place anyway.
As an example — just yesterday (so after a few days of hotfixes already) — I jumped into a Steel Path Circuit run with a friend and two PUGs. In transitioning from one circuit to the next, one person got left behind on the PREVIOUS section while everyone else was teleported over successfully to the new area. There were no objectives however for anyone, and the enemy AI just seemed to have a meltdown and stop responding to anyone.
Or on the first night we were playing, after the single-player questline, we tried a Duviri cycle. But we made the error of daring to do an optional element, and it broke the main questline objective marker. It just disappeared and never came back. This happened on multiple seperate attempts to get through a cycle.
*shakes fist*
So while I do think that Duviri will be a better onboarding experience for new players than what was previously in place, and that the reward structures it includes will be of benefit to new and old players alike… It most certainly isn’t there yet. I’d highly recommend giving it some weeks before venturing a toe in.
Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order / Survivor
I wasn’t really expecting to pick-up Star Wars: Jedi Survivor any time soon. Sure, I enjoyed well enough what I played of Fallen Order back when it came out, but — and here’s a shock — I never finished it.
A friend decided to pick-up and play Fallen Order again as well though ahead of this release and it just so happened we’d left off at similar points in the story from our last runs. So we picked it up as a SPMP (Singleplayer, Multiplayer) game by way of playing at the same time while on Discord — something we quite enjoy doing!
As the story elements of Fallen Order picked up, I certainly became a lot more engaged with Cal Kestis and crew’s journey and before long, it was pretty inevitable that I’d be picking up Survivor on launch as well then. Shame it launched in such a god-awful technical state then.
I was having a pretty good time with it even those issues aside, until the third planet, where I started getting hard crashes in certain areas. I have managed to get through those seemingly problem parts (for now), and the game has (hopefully I’m not jinxing it here) returned to being stable again, but geez.
Death Stranding Director’s Cut
If you were wondering, after my last post on the game — no, I haven’t returned yet.
Although it feels less like a mental block now, and more about simply wanting to finish Star Wars: Jedi Survivor first. Although when Survivor started crashing on me, I got very close to shelving it and jumping back to this instead. If I hadn’t been playing Survivor as SPMP, that likely would’ve been exactly what happened.
Although I still have Cyberpunk sitting there in the wings waiting for a return of my gaze… So we’ll have to see which wins out this month once Survivor is over!
