Time to Loot Journal: September 2020

It’s hard to believe we’re so far through the year. Just three months remain before we flip 2020 the bird and put it firmly in the rear view. Yet as hard as it is to conceive of how little of 2020 remains… It’s also been quite the long year already. It’s sometimes hard to remember that the events prior to Wednesday 25th March — when New Zealand officially entered into a nationwide state of lockdown with a strict stay-at-home order — were part of this year too.

I keep mentally placing everything from ‘before’ into the ‘last year’ bucket.

In any case. While I absolutely recognise that others have had — and continue to have it worse than we have here in New Zealand, I also can’t deny it’s taken a bit of a toll on me even so. Gaming and posting had both taken a bit of a dive. So getting a PC Upgrade this month has certainly been a welcome reprieve from an otherwise unrelenting year.

Although I did forget to actually install ManicTime (the tool I use for game tracking) for the first few days… er… or a week… of running the new machine. So some games in my list this month are going to be either underrepresented or missing entirely. (Cities: Skylines in particular falls into that missing pile.)

Still! It could be worse. I’ve heard a raft of horror stories around the nVidia 3000-series launch running commonly along the themes of either availability or stability. Fortunately, neither of which overly impacted me. I was able to watch in the Aorus GPU monitor for example, many games push the clocks of my card over the 2,000MHz threshold and remain rock steady.

…Until I gave Division 2 a try at least. That was the sole exception. But then I’m not even sure whether to place it in the same problem bucket as the SP-CAP/MLCC capacitor issues as even with a modest underclock to keep the boost from exceeding 2GHz, Division 2 would just ‘Lol, nope’ out on me within minutes of loading.

But no worries there either now. nVidia’s 456.55 driver launched a few days ago seems to have that sorted too, whether the root cause of the issue was the same or not. Anecdotally, it seems this was really quite a miracle driver release that managed to solve stability for a wide range of users without imposing speed-impacting limits.

Anyway, how did I go with my goals?

Gaming Goals

September’s Goals

• Finish Control
  Well, it’s a simple and clear enough goal at least! Finish the main story and the DLC story.

Damnit. Foiled again by past-me. If I hadn’t added ‘and the DLC’ to that goal I could’ve marked it complete.

I’ve finished the main story. And I’ve started the first DLC, but I haven’t finished it. I ended up waiting to see how it would go on this new machine, in particular with RTX and DLSS on.

DLSS in Control with a super ultrawide (32:9) monitor is a little problematic though. It attempts to stretch a resolution it’s more comfortable with out over the entire screen and it… Doesn’t look good.

There is actually a fix (well… of a sorts) for this. If you head into the nVidia Control Panel, go to Display -> Adjust desktop size and position and then set ‘Perform scaling on’ to ‘GPU’ rather than the default of ‘Display’. Then also set ‘Override the scaling mode set by games and programs’ to be on.

After you’ve done that, Control will render at the correct resolution albeit with black bars. Still not perfect, but a heck of a lot better than the stretched look.

Anywho… Er.. the goal. Yes. Maybe in October? ;)

October’s Goals

• Play and write-up Part 7 of the Blogger City Series!
  Not going to set any particular milestone goals for the city itself — the goal is just to get a Part 7 up and posted this month. :)
  
• Finish Control
  Yep — DLC as well this time!

Two whole goals this time, woo! Really pushing things with this one. Alright – perhaps not. But in the context of a new PC and wanting to play *all the things*? Nngggh! :)

Games Played in September

As noted in the intro — there was a period of time where games were not tracked as I forgot to install ManicTime right off the bat. But I have otherwise combined the data from the previous PC with the new.

So that does mean the odd title — particularly ones I was testing for performance but not yet truly ‘playing’ like Cities: Skylines — will be missing from this list, and some others will be showing less than true hours. But I’m OK with this! This data set when entered to 2 DP (although I only show 1) adds up to 100 hours flat. (Well… 100.02; but as I say — only showing 1 DP.)

100 hours of gaming in a month is pretty high even by my standards, but not as high as last September as it turns out. Last September I played a whopping 143.8 hours of games. Nearly half of which was my return to emulated Asheron’s Call. Another large chunk of it was playing Borderlands 3. I had forgotten that launched September until I went back and checked what on earth I was playing that I clearly loved so much that month. But it checks out; since I had seen Borderlands 3 recently launch on Steam, marking the end of the year of exclusivity. Pardon me while I try to unroll my eyes from the back of my head at that.

Anywho, I’d also made a bit of a return to WoW last month. I had thought in preparation for Shadowlands this month… Turns out, not so much though. I thought I might get into it a bit again, but it didn’t really grab me. I might still go poke my head in for the prepatch later though.

Oh! Also? I made a decision! I’m going main Mage in Shadowlands.

I’ll wait while you recollect yourselves and get back on your seats.

No, really! It’s big news. I’ve been either tank or healer since forever. Primarily Druid, but I still have strong connections to Warrior too, being the class I started out in Classic back when ‘Classic’ was still just ‘WoW’.

I have dabbled in the odd expansion, sure. I tanked as a Paladin in Cata. I went Resto Shaman in MoP. I switched gears to Holy/Disc Priest in WoD, switching spec depending on the fight. But otherwise? Always Warrior or Druid.

So going Mage, a 100% DPS no matter the spec is quite a shift for me. It was a bit of a toss-up between that and Hunter, but Mage won out in the end. So that will be new and exciting.

The Blog

I hit the ‘publish’ button just 7 times in September. The largest gap between far though (5 days with 0 posts) occurred over the period where I was also building this new PC, so I’m not going to be too hard on myself.

Most Viewed Posts

1. Deep Rock Galactic: The Solo Experience
2. Humble Choice: September 2020
3. Remnant vs. Dark Souls
4. Transport Fever: Things I Wish I Knew When I Started
5. Upgrade Time Ahoy!

Deep Rock Galactic interest has surged again. Possibly because Update 32 is coming later this month(Oct 22, it was delayed from originally announced for Oct 8) which includes two new map/mission modes.

Whether that’s the reason or not though, it easily doubles the interest of the next highest about the September Humble Choice bundle, a series which is no slouch in its own right!

Only one of the five posts was one published this month, but then this probably shouldn’t be too surprising with so few posts published to even potentially reach the glory of a top five spot. ;)

Let’s see what October brings!