Time to Loot Journal: September 2021

September had the same number of days in it as any other month. More or less. But to me, it feels a lifetime ago. I barely remember the beginning of the month or writing the last journal at the end of the last. We’ve been in a stay-at-home lockdown since mid-August and I suppose that is bound to do weird things to one’s perception of time.

I’ve sort of felt it over the past weeks, in the sense that each individual day has flown by but by the end of the week it feels as if a mini-eternity has passed.

…

Weird.

Anyway, time for the look back!

Looking Back

One Year Ago

Last September was a pretty light posting month too. Lighter even than this one. Looking to the September 2019 Journal it seems to be from the fact we were riding the end of a rather extended lockdown then, too. One we didn’t come out of until October, according to the COVID-19 History of Alert Levels for New Zealand.

It wasn’t all gloom though. Retail therapy goes a long way! Especially when…

• It involves the purchase and build of a new PC! It all seemed to be going fairly swimmingly out of the gate, but I did later encounter some issues with the RTX 3080 which took the better part of October to finally resolve. Turned out, the crashing had nothing to do with capacitor-gate or even the shonky day 1 drivers. Nope; was stranger than that. It just didn’t like the full speed memory timings of my RAM — even though the RAM was perfectly comfortable running at those timings when tested independently. In any case — the system has been amazing since then. Hopefully should get a generation-skip of GPUs out of it again. :)
  
• Sand worms saw a surge in popularity — the initial Dune trailer dropped (with the movie coming out very shortly now, as it turns out!) alongside the No Man’s Sky: Origins update, which finally, many years after the initial trailers promising them, added giant sand worms as a potential creature spawn.

Two Years Ago

I was going to summarise September 2019 by simply saying I played lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of Asheron’s Call again. Looking back over those posts, and seeing the map again brought my heart up into my throat. Hard to identify whether it was nostalgia for specifically my 2019 play through before all this COVID stuff really took the world by storm, whether it was for the original times I played or some combination of the two.

But as it turns out, a few other things happened too.

• Cube World emerged from hibernation and into a surprise release — I’d seriously given up all hope of ever seeing this thing. Then all of a sudden… There it was! Steam keys available on the old store site for those who’d bought it. Unfortunately, I didn’t love what it had morphed into — but it was still fun enough for a bit of a blast, and I’m glad Wollay managed to get it out in the end.
  
• The Steam library revamp went into open beta — I love the changes this update brought to the library, I only wish they had continued and added further refinements to filters and their ability to create actually useful dynamic collections. I’ve since ended up removing all my dynamic collections and returned to creating static ones.

Gaming Goals

September’s Goals

• The Elder Scrolls Online: Get current character higher than my previous character!
  Which won’t be terribly hard — my Elsweyr character only made it to level 23, which surprised me to no end when I saw. I could’ve sworn I’d got further than that. In any case, the new one is already level 16!
• Returnal: Beat Phrike!
  I really need to get in a few more concerted runs — ideally equipped with the Astronaut relic — and get this bugger down. I’m so close, but I’ve only been playing a run every so many days which is hardly the best way to develop the necessary muscle memory reactions for a fight like this.

I made Level 26 or so in ESO, so that goal is complete. But then Tales of Arise came out. This wasn’t a surprise, but I still clearly forgot when it came to setting these goals. I touched a very limited number of games this month and not one of them was on the PS5. Whoops!

October’s Goals

• New World: Get further than I did in the betas.
  Not exactly an ambitious goal — I think the most I ever put into a single beta was 4-5 hours.
• Returnal: Beat Phrike!
  Not letting this goal go just yet — so carrying it over into this month as well.

Games Played September 2021

I was lucky to meet my ESO goal really, as after Tales of Arise dropped on Sept 10th — that was it. I had neither time nor inclination for anything else.

The one game I’ve not listed here is Cookie Clicker. Being an idle game, but one I kept running — it didn’t make a lot of sense to include it. But according to Steam, it has had ~322 hours of runtime. Manic Time suggests 120 hours, meaning I accidentally left it as the focused window at some point. Or, lots of ‘some points’.

Books Read September 2021

Still working my way through the final book (Book #5) of Peter V. Brett’s ‘Demon Cycle’ series — The Core.

Last month, I suspected my slow reading patch was as much a symptom of not really enjoying the book all that much.

I think I need to retract that now. Or, at the least, acknowledge my interest has grown as I work my way through the book. I’m somewhere around the 70% complete mark now and it has been pretty good, actually!

It just hasn’t translated back into (much) extra reading time. So I’m still in a phase of slow reading and doing other things instead — but I no longer blame the book for that, in this instance.

It just is what it is and I’ll get to the review whenever I get to it. :)

The Blog

September was a rather light month for posts with just 9 published. After I hit the publish button on this post, the grand total for Time to Loot will be a nice, round, 480 posts published. It’s looking more likely than not that I will hit the 500 published posts milestone this year after all. :)

Most Viewed Posts

1. Deep Rock Galactic: The Solo Experience
2. Catching up in Destiny 2
3. WoW Shadowlands: Changing your Covenant BACK
4. Transport Fever: Things I Wish I Knew When I Started
5. Aliens Fireteam Elite – Campaign Complete

When the Deep Rock Galactic post rises to the top like that, you can generally be fairly sure there has been an update. And sure enough — there was. Mid-September saw a rather significant looking release that added in mod-support, even online (thanks to a bit of a mod-classification system to determine what should happen to existing characters wanting to interact with the mod in question).

Already there is a teaser for another (I assume big) drop or event or something of some kind for 4th November this year.

I wonder what that one will be?