Endgame Viable

The continuing adventures of Warren on his first day on the job at CREO. We’ve now reached the point in the story where I no longer remember what happened, didn’t write anything down, and don’t have enough time to re-watch the videos to figure it out. Soooooo. Yeah. Vague, one-sentence summaries!

Previously: The Surge, Resolve Biolabs

Next: The Surge, Executive Forum and Nexus

The continuing adventures of Warren hacking and slashing his way through the Resolve Biolabs to reach his ultimate goal of … who knows? Warren doesn’t really have any motivation. Just an unquenchable thirst for hacking up robots and zombies. (Though he might have a secret backstory.)

Previously: The Surge, Central Production B

Next: The Surge, Research and Development

I put together my new PC build over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. There’re always some surprises when you build a PC: Things that don’t go according to plan. Here’s some of mine.

The Gungnir 100 “Battle for Your Oats” case is massive. It’s supposed to be a “mid-sized” case but I’m 100% positive I’ve owned full-sized tower cases in the 2000s as big as this thing. It’s way bigger than my last PC case, which was already bigger than the one before that.

But weirdly, since there are no 5 1/4" bays inside the case, the vast majority of the space inside the case is empty. Besides all the extra air ventilation, the missing 5 1/4" bays create tons of room for cabling, and there’s nothing blocking the SATA connectors on the edge of the motherboard anymore, which is nice.

The case has a solid tempered glass side, to show off all the cool blinky lights (if you take the time to install such things). It might be a nice feature, except there are no handholds on the glass, it’s just a solid flat rectangular piece of glass like a window pane held in place with screws. So once you screw it in place, there’s no more easy access to the inside of the PC. The days where you have to reach inside your PC to fiddle with things every couple of days are long gone, but it’s still kind of a disappointment.

Also, for reasons I can’t fully understand, there’s a very solid wall between the power supply area and the motherboard area of this case. All the cabling from the power supply and the front panel of the case to the motherboard (which is a lot) has to feed through little holes between the sections. It’s a massive pain.

The only reason I can think for them to make the case that way is to hide more cabling and make the motherboard area more visually appealing when it’s on display behind the tempered glass. Which seems quite silly to me but I guess some people are less practical than I am.

Also, the Gungnir case is heavy. It’s old-school that way. I initially figured it was mainly made of plastic, but it’s heavy enough that it might have some actual metal in it (though it doesn’t say that anywhere in the literature).

I bought an MSI power supply to make sure all the cables would fit exactly in an MSI motherboard, making the assumption that MSI would know how to match their stuff together.

Well, they don’t.

The motherboard has one 8-pin 12V CPU connector and one 4-pin 12V CPU connector, but the power supply only has two 8-pin 12V CPU connectors. So I can only plug in one of them. There might be adapter cables available somewhere, but from what I’ve read, the extra 4-pin 12V connector is unnecessary except in “extreme overclocking” situations. Still, pretty disappointing. I paid a little extra for MSI brand stuff to avoid exactly that kind of mismatch. Oh well. Unexpected incompatibilities are inevitable in a PC build no matter how hard you try.

There are so many cables and little connectors that attach to a motherboard now. It feels like way more than the last time I built a PC. Two full edges of the motherboard are covered with little pin connectors of various kinds.

I’m sure I spent at least 75% of my time on attaching cables. I had to constantly flip the case over from the front side to the back side, because of the giant wall between the motherboard and the power supply area. It was a major pain in the butt, and the source of much frustration.

Cabling is the main reason I always swear to myself that I’m going to buy a pre-built PC next time, because I hate doing it so, so much. I can’t see that well anymore, and everything’s teeny tiny and hard to reach, and sometimes the cables are just barely long enough. Ugh.

I knew I was going to have to move my old graphics card from my old gaming PC to the new gaming PC, because you can’t buy graphics cards right now.

What I didn’t expect is how much that would affect video production.

I intended to use the new PC only to run games. That’s why I got a Core i5 instead of a Core i7 or i9. I didn’t intend to run OBS on it at all, which would free up a little more CPU and GPU power for games. I was going to move to a two-PC solution and use the old PC as a dedicated “video production” and OBS recording station. (I have an Elgato HD60 capture card to record HDMI input from the new PC.)

The intended new setup.

It was a great plan, except you can’t do any of that without a GPU. Once I pulled the 1070 out of the old PC, it turned into a useless brick with just an Intel integrated graphics processor. (To add further insult to injury, a brick with only an HDMI output, which no longer matched the old DVI connector on the old monitor I had been using.)

I tried to record video with CPU-powered encoding, but that failed miserably. I just couldn’t get it to encode fast enough to keep up with 1080p 60fps, without turning the quality settings all the way down to “horrible.”

Then I found an old GeForce 770 card, which was what I used before 2016. So I plugged it into my old PC, thinking that would easily solve my video encoding problems.

Well, it did, kind of, but not entirely. The 770 is a lot more underpowered than I remember it, particularly in the area of video encoding. After fiddling with the OBS settings for a while, I was able to get it to keep up with encoding 1080p 60fps, mostly, but it uses a huge chunk of the GPU power to do it. Basically all of it. (Whereas the 1070 used maybe 5% of the GPU power for the same encoding.)

On the plus side, the 770 has a DVI monitor output, so my old monitor gets to live on a little while longer.

That mostly solved my OBS recording problem, but I also wanted to continue to do video editing and rendering on the old PC.

That’s where the 770 failed miserably. Movie Studio Platinum just flat didn’t work. Davinci Resolve worked, but Resolve is way more complicated to use than it needs to be, so I don’t like it that much.

I learned that there’s a CUDA “Compute Capability” rating with all GeForce cards. The 770 is 3.0, while the 1070 is 6.1. Somehow those numbers mean the 770 doesn’t cut it for my editing needs, but the 1070 does.

The bottom line is that I had to install Movie Studio Platinum on the new PC where the 1070 now resides to do any video editing, which is a bummer. Apparently if your PC can’t play video games, it also can’t do much video editing. I didn’t expect that.

As a side note, Movie Studio Platinum stores most of your presets and settings with the PC it’s installed on, so most of my editing configuration and VST plugins disappeared when I moved to another PC. Very aggravating.

I also failed to anticipate the problems with juggling two keyboards and two mice with two PCs. Sometimes I want to, you know, interact with the second PC. That means I have to plug it into a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. Often you can get away with a remote desktop situation for a second PC, but usually not when gaming or video editing is involved.

I don’t have enough room on my rickety little living room writing desk for two full-sized keyboards and mice. I tried a USB switcher, but it’s not ideal. It’s also a pain to switch my main monitor between the two different PCs. The whole thing is extremely awkward and it hinders my gaming workflow. I can’t quite figure out how to resolve this particular problem without creating a full physical workspace for the second PC, which means getting a new desk to fit both PCs or a second desk for the second PC.

Late-breaking news, since I failed to publish this post for weeks on end, I can now report that I did successfully secure an MSI GeForce 3070 card in one of those NewEgg Shuffle lotteries, which was the exact card I would have bought if there hadn’t been any shortages.

As expected, the performance difference between a 3070 and a 1070 is not as amazing as previous generations of graphics card upgrades. It’s better, but it’s not dramatically better. In the old days, upgrading your graphics card meant your FPS went from 30 fps to 200 fps. Now it goes from 30 fps to 40 fps. I think we’ve reached peak graphics performance for the foreseeable future. Look for graphics cards to start distinguishing themselves with dumb features like more and more RBG lighting (my 3070 has an unwanted pulsing light bar on it) or, I dunno, built-in toaster ovens or something, so you can heat up a cheese sandwich while you play.

The continuing adventures of Warren rending his way through his first day on the job at CREO.

Previously: The Surge, Abandoned Production

Next: The Surge, Resolve Biolabs

The 42-part adventure in The Surge begins, a game that was fun except for the boss fights, and the last zone, which was an ordeal to finish.

I was somewhat inspired by Naithan’s Dark Souls Remastered series to try to provide slightly narrative reader-friendly descriptions of each part, but I can tell you that I’ve already run out of energy for such intensely ungratifying work after only eight parts. Summarizing a 40-minute video in a couple of entertaining sentences is really time-consuming.

Next: The Surge, Central Production B

Or: “Battle for Your Oats.”

Hey it’s one of those posts nobody ever reads! At least I don’t. Every time I see a post about somebody’s new PC, I immediately ignore it because reading about PC specs is either boring or annoying.

But I know why people write them. It’s because you put so much effort into researching what the current state-of-the-art is, so you can make a reasonably informed buying choice. But first, since you’ve completely forgotten the research that was done last time you built a PC, you have to research the last build again, then research what’s changed since that last build. All that effort has to count for something, so it goes into a blog post I guess. Maybe next time I can refer to this post so I don’t have to spend weeks figuring this stuff out.

I keep threatening myself that next time I do a gaming PC upgrade, I’m going to buy a pre-built one. But every time I investigate those, they either look ridiculous in a godawful case design, or they’re at least twice as expensive as the parts they’re made of. Or both. And I almost always disagree with the parts they use in those builds. For example, the pre-builts with the GeForce 30xx graphics cards in them usually have a Core i9 processor in them, and I didn’t want that.

First, why should I upgrade? I built my last gaming PC in 2016 and it has performed admirably since then. It still runs most games pretty solidly.

It all started with The Division 2 Open Beta. It was the first game I remember thinking “hey this doesn’t run so hot on my PC, maybe it’s time to think about upgrading.” Subsequently I was able to get it to run and record at a solid 60 fps, which is the most important thing to me as a gamer. (It doesn’t matter what resolution it runs at, or whether it’s using High, Medium, or Low settings, as long as it runs at 60 fps with vertical sync on, and I can record it at the same time.)

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey struggled to reach 60 fps on my PC as well, but that game wasn’t good enough for me to care so much about.

Now I’m playing The Surge 2, and it also has problems. I don’t mind switching from High to Medium (most of the time, I can’t even tell the difference between Ultra High and Medium graphical settings anyway, especially in an action-based game). I’ll always pick higher frame rate over higher visual fidelity. But I draw the line at having to set a frame rate cap of 50 fps to maintain a smooth experience. That’s going too far!

(Kudos to The Surge 2 for even having a 50 fps frame cap. Most of the time the frame rate cap setting goes from 60 all the way down to 30, which is absurd.)

I’ve subsequently learned that graphical problems in The Surge 2 aren’t entirely the fault of my PC, since it uses some wacky game engine and a “Vulkan” API instead of DirectX, whatever that is. But still, the signs have been pointing to a PC upgrade for a while now. I used to think two years between upgrades was a long time, and it’s been almost five years now.

I was looking for a link to a 2016 blog post about my current PC, but it turns out I barely even mentioned it. I think I deliberately avoid writing blog posts about new PCs, because it always feels very pretentious to write a blog post that basically boils down to, “Look how much more well-off I am than you!!” There’s a long history of gloating surrounding PC upgrades that I don’t particularly care to participate in. (It’s the same as people who gloat about shiny new cars, or raid gear in MMORPGs.)

My PC was pretty spiffy in the summer of 2016. I intentionally spent more back then because I wanted something that would last a while, so I went a little higher on the price/performance hockey stick curve than I usually go. I even bought a pricey 144hz 27" Dell monitor. It was the most expensive gaming rig I had ever put together. It’s performed admirably during the last almost-five years. Here’s the core stat block for that 2016 PC:

The only complaint I could possibly make about that PC is that I’ve seen some occasional weirdness with USB connectivity. (I’m saying “that PC” like it’s already in the past, even though I’m typing on it right now.) Also it doesn’t have enough USB connectivity. Every PC should have at least 12 solidly-performing USB 3.0 ports, and maybe another 6 USB 2.0 ports, if you ask me. And then maybe another 10 or 20 just in case. I have potentially so many USB peripherals to plug in.

With every new PC I build, I learn about new things. To cut to the chase, here’s the new information I gleaned for 2021 PC builds.

There are rumors that the AMD processors are actually better than Intel processors right now, but I just can’t bring myself to investigate that world. It’s just easier not to have to think about it. I’m also a GeForce guy instead of a Radeon guy. (I bought a Radeon card many many years ago when there was a big stir about them finally being better than GeForce cards, and it was a terrible gaming experience.)

I recently read a compelling argument somewhere (of course I can’t find it now) that the Core i5 is the better processor for a dedicated gaming PC, because it has a higher base clock speed, and the extra cores you get with the i7 and i9 are less useful in gaming. It made sense to me. I’m going to see if there’s any truth to that. (I’ve selected a motherboard where I can pop in a Core i7 or i9 later if I want to.)

The new hotness at the start of 2021 is the 11th generation “Rocket Lake” processors, the Intel Z590 chipset, and the faster PCIe 4.0 bus.

Another new thing for me in 2021 is M.2. This is a new interface for connecting SSDs (and other stuff, but it seems like SSDs are the main thing that use it right now). With the 11th generation Rocket Lake processors, there’s a particular kind of M.2 SSD you have to get that supports the fastest transfer rate on the PCI 4.0 bus. And you have to make sure you get the right “key” that matches your motherboard.

There is now an 8+4-pin CPU connector to the motherboard instead of a 4+4-pin CPU connector. I think it’s some derivation of the “EPS” power supply standard for servers. It’s apparently used when the processor is drawing a lot of power, as in “extreme” overclocking. I read a lot of conflicting reports about whether you actually need to plug in the extra 4 pins or not. But hopefully MSI knows how to make power supplies for their own motherboards.

When you really get down into the nitty-gritty and compare specs, it turns out there isn’t really a huge difference between 2021 and 2016 in terms of processing power. Processors today are still running at roughly the same clock speeds as they were in 2016, with roughly the same number of cores. GPUs still have roughly the same clock speed and memory. We’re all still running Windows 10, with no new OS anywhere on the horizon. I fully expect I’m not going to see as much of a noticeable improvement in a new PC today as I did in 2016.

As a species, I think we’ve reached a technical plateau in gaming. I think that’s why the industry is trying to get us to move to ray-tracing: Because there’s nowhere else to go in order to convince the dumb glory-hungry gamers to keep buying new stuff every few years. But that’s a different discussion.

And last but certainly not least: You can’t buy a graphics card in 2021 because everyone is constantly out of stock. It’s been going on for a solid six months or more. It makes building a new gaming PC somewhat challenging. I buy most of my computer parts at NewEgg since forever, and they have a “lottery” system for graphics cards. And if you do happen to find a graphics card, they’re way more expensive than they normally would be. This is a terrible time for a gaming PC upgrade, in other words.

Here’s what I’m buying for the new 2021 build. It’s the same basic idea as what I did in 2016: Not the bleeding edge, where you’re throwing most of your money away, but a couple steps back from the bleeding edge to increase price/performance ratio. There’s a point where that ratio gets ridiculous, and the only reason you’re spending that extra money is so you can say, “Hey, I got the newest thing, look how special I am!” I like to stay below that point.

I happened to already have a 2TB hard drive that I haven’t installed anywhere else, so I’ll be putting it in the new PC as a second drive. However I’m hoping to avoid recording videos on this new PC, so hopefully I won’t be constantly running out of space. The plan is to use the old gaming PC as a dedicated recording PC. (We’ll see how long that lasts, because it’s probably going to be more inconvenient.)

In general, here’s my current philosophy on gaming PC upgrades:

Brand selection is largely a matter of personal preference, unless you’re super into this stuff, which I’m not. My last PC was an MSI build and it worked flawlessly for almost five years so I don’t see any reason to change. (Before that I bought Gigabyte parts. Before that it was always an ASUS motherboard. A long, long time ago I had a Tyan dual Pentium Pro motherboard, which was rad.) I don’t remember why I ended up on MSI parts.

In the old days, I only bought the guts of the PC, swapped out the old guts, and put the new guts into an existing case and power supply. I don’t do that anymore, because I don’t want any “down time.” I want the new PC to run simultaneously with the old PC, so now I always get a new case for the new parts. I don’t always get a new keyboard or mouse though.

I don’t mess with overclocking anymore and I’ve never touched liquid cooling. I like to match the brand of motherboard with the brand of GPU card, just so there aren’t any weird incompatibilities. Stability is generally the most important thing to me in PC hardware.

In 2021, I decided to widen the scope of my brand-matching plan to match the motherboard, GPU, power supply, and case brands. I often run into subtle incompatibilities between power supplies and motherboards, and between cases and motherboards, and I don’t want to deal with that anymore. Price differences are negligible, relative to the overall cost. (A 1% savings on a cheaper brand of power supply or case is meaningless to me.)

Last time I bought Corsair memory, but this time I’m buying G.SKILL memory because it’s notably cheaper. I don’t have any brand loyalty or preferences when it comes to memory. As far as I know, they’re all the same, and one CAS latency number is the same as another. (Not that I have any way of verifying whether they’re making up those numbers or not.) I don’t know anything about the G.SKILL brand but it comes up a lot in searches and the specs look the same to me. Cross your fingers.

I don’t care in the slightest for “RGB” lighting or whatever, so I’ve bought exactly none of that. I want my gaming PC in a plain black box on the floor where I can’t see or hear it. I personally think the visual aesthetic of most “gaming” hardware in 2021 looks a lot like cheap plastic Fisher Price baby toys from the 80s.

Prototype for next year's gaming PCs.

They don’t look sleek and futuristic to me in the slightest. Still, they always manage to sneak the blinky lights in somewhere and I think there’s some blinky disco fans or something in my case somewhere.

The best part of my new case is that it has a slogan: “Battle for Your Oath.” After a lot of careful reflection and consideration, I don’t know what those words mean when they’re put together in that combination. I prefer to think of it as a typo, and the slogan for my new PC will henceforth be “Battle for Your Oats.”

Anyway I should have most of the parts by this weekend, so I’ll assemble it then.

I’ve been using the same mouse since 2014: A Razer Naga. I thought it was older than that, but apparently not. It’s a great mouse. Except for all those thumb buttons which seemed like a great idea at the time, but in actual practice I never use intentionally and constantly trigger them accidentally. I also have to lower the mouse sensitivity slider setting in every single game almost all the way to the left side. Oh, and sometimes it just stops working in the middle of a game for no reason. Other than those things, it’s great. :)

I decided to buy a Razer DeathAdder V2. Not the Pro, because I want a wired mouse. Always, always, always wired mice. I tried a wireless mouse for gaming exactly one time in the 90s with Quake and I won’t ever consider it again. Anyway, hopefully Razer still has the same build quality. This one has a much more reasonable two thumb buttons.

I’m also buying a mechanical keyboard. I haven’t used a mechanical keyboard since my last one died and/or the PS/2 ports became obsolete, somewhere in the late 90s or early 00s. (Back then, they were just called “keyboards.” They were all mechanical.) Oh, no, not PS/2 ports. Those old white clacky IBM mechanical keyboards I used throughout the 90s used 5-pin DIN connectors. PS/2 ports were the new ones back then.

However, I absolutely positively don’t want a loud clacky keyboard again, so I bought a black Cherry MX “Silent” keyboard. For some reason, I couldn’t find any non-Cherry branded keyboards that used the Cherry MX Silent key technology, so I just went to the source. Like all mechanical keyboards, it’s expensive. I splurged. We’ll see just how quiet it actually is. It’s kind of an annoying crap shoot buying keyboards these days, you never know what you’re going to get because you can’t test them beforehand. Therefore I’m loathe to spend a lot of money on them.

Incidentally, I found a YouTube video that helped decide which mechanical keyboard switches were quietest:

This will hopefully replace a Corsair K55 keyboard, which I will never pass up an opportunity to say is a terrible keyboard for the $50 price tag. I don’t know about the rest of their product line, but based on this experience, I can’t imagine ever buying another Corsair keyboard again.

I also just discovered there are mouse pads that are more like keyboard-and-mouse pads. They are big enough that you can sit your keyboard on it, and it extends out to the side so you can also set your mouse on it. Where was that back when I was playing Quake? What a great idea! Especially lately when playing The Surge 2, where you have to do mouse gestures to parry attacks, my mouse pad is constantly sliding all over the place on my desk. So I got one of those too.

You know you’re spending extravagantly when you buy a mouse pad. I can’t even remember the last time I intentionally purchased a mouse pad. That Razer Naga I bought came with a free mouse pad, which I’ve been using since 2014. It’s the one that slides all over my desk. Before that, I’m sure I was using some free mouse pad that came with something else. Way back in the 90s, back when I was into gaming enough to fall for these sorts of gimmicks, I vaguely remember buying a handful of textured “precision gaming mouse pads” for Quake, which were designed to work with roller mice. I threw them away at some point.

The one thing I’m not getting in my new gaming PC is a graphics card. You simply can’t buy them right now. Unless you have Russian mafia connections or something.

I haven’t quite decided whether to get a 3070 or a 3080. They’re both going to be a ridiculously expensive luxury, so why not get the better one for a little more? On the other hand, I’ve had amply good performance from the more budget-friendly 1070 for the past five years, so why waste money? Scientifically, according to benchmarks, the 3080 is about 12% better performance than the 3070, and according to current skyrocketing prices, it’s about 40% more expensive. A 12% reduction in rendering speed from 60 fps is about 53 fps, which isn’t terrible, even if I might prefer 60 fps. (Those ratios are exactly why I got the 1070 back in 2016 instead of a 1080, because the price/performance metrics were pretty similar.) To complicate matters, MSI also makes three different models of each GPU, with more minor variations in specs and major variations in price. It’s never simple in the graphics card buying biz.

In any case until all you dumb cryptocurrency miners out there quit driving the prices up and/or until China quits hoarding their chips, I’ll have to put my old 1070 in the new PC for the foreseeable future. Or maybe just use the integrated graphics on the processor and see if you can actually play anything with it.

In the meantime, I’ll be trying to remember to go to a web site every day to see if there’s a lottery available for a graphics card. Or there’s always eBay!

Such a deal!

The end of my streak of miscellaneous one-off videos.

At this point I ran out of “miscellaneous” games to upload, and intended to start uploading The Surge. But at roughly this time I was on the verge of rage-quitting The Surge because of the last zone and wondered if I would ever actually finish it.

My first The Surge video is scheduled for upload tomorrow. I'm pretty annoyed with the end of the game right now--it seems very clumsy and unpolished and underdeveloped and just plain not fun anymore--so I have today to decide whether to yank that upload and abandon the game. :)

So I dug into my vault of “evergreen” uploads and found Assassin’s Creed III. Remember when that game was considered “controversial?” That’s what Assassin’s Creed games used to be: Historical fiction worth having conversations about.

Since I did go on to finish The Surge, I’ll be interrupting Assassin’s Creed III and uploading The Surge soon. It’s okay though, the first act of Assassin’s Creed III is by far the best part of the game. The remainder is a bit of a mess, story-wise. Classic “not enough time to really finish it” game syndrome.

I blurted out some tweets yesterday morning about Final Fantasy XIV which I think need some further clarification.

Endwalker sort of confirms to me that FFXIV has hit that "we don't have to innovate anymore, just put out whatever, the fans will like it" state that is always the inevitable death of an MMORPG, or (hopefully) a signal that they've internally switched to making a new one.

Of course I was immediately challenged on this viewpoint. I should have known that my idle morning thoughts, the time of day when I’m most creative and least filtered, would be the worst things to say in public, especially when completely devoid of context. In my head, there’s a long backstory to that tweet, but all anyone else saw was the tweet.

Herein I will try to elaborate on what I meant, and why I should not be lumped into the same category as all the unwashed masses of “the game is dying!” people. :)

To be clear, I like FFXIV a lot. I think it’s the best MMORPG out there, the best graphics, the best combat, and the best systems, the three things that are required for any modern MMO to succeed. Also, arguably, the fourth and most important thing, far more important than anything done by the developers: The rabid mob of a fan community who will blindly defend anything no matter what, long after the rest of the world has moved on. There’s really only two MMORPGs to pick from now in this top-tier space that check all four of those boxes: WoW and FFXIV. There’s some others that might also qualify, like Elder Scrolls Online or maybe Black Desert, but those are the top two for sure. Most other MMORPGs have only niche appeal in 2021.

So we’d like for these top two (or however many) MMORPGs to stick around forever. But I worry a lot that FFXIV’s game engine is stagnating, or has already stagnated. By “engine,” I mean the software platform and infrastructure that it runs on. It’s the same code base that started way back in FFXIV 1.0, circa 2010. Or possibly even earlier, because I’m sure it has roots in Final Fantasy XI.

So whenever there’s a new FFXIV expansion, like Endwalker, I look for signs that they’re upgrading the engine to last into the future. I didn’t see any of those signs in Shadowbringers, and I don’t see any in Endwalker. Not yet, at least. It’s still early, I suppose.

As a software developer myself, that fills me with dread. All software eventually exceeds its original design specifications, and must either be upgraded to support newer requirements or abandoned. There’s a concept developers love to talk about called “technical debt.” Basically it means, unless you actively spend development time to avoid this specific problem, there comes a point where you simply can’t feasibly put new stuff into old software. (See: Lord of the Rings Online.) The manager-types dealing with these sorts of problems usually set a personal goal to retire before it blows up in their face.

Fighting technical debt.

So FFXIV has two choices, as I see it. The same two choices that every MMORPG must make if they somehow miraculously survive more than a year beyond launch day: 1) Follow the EverQuest model and limp along with a static, unchanging platform as long as they possibly can, delivering tiny incremental changes but mostly just new art assets and quest text every expansion. The diehard community will (hopefully) eat up every expansion and defend it to their dying breath, but the game will never get any new players, and they’ll slowly lose their audience until they eventually have no choice but to turn it off (a la Asheron’s Call). This is the easy path, the path of least resistance, but it’s also gambling that a competitor’s game won’t appear and fill the same niche and do it better. (Fortunately, there’s little chance of anyone else filling the FFXIV niche anytime soon.)

Or 2) Follow the WoW model and continually re-invent the platform with every expansion. People will be constantly upset, they’ll lose diehard fans of the “old ways,” but they’ll always gain new players who can jump onboard for the ride and start anywhere, anytime, resulting in (hopefully) a perpetual steady state and a “fresh”-looking game indefinitely. This option requires a considerable amount of development effort and planning to make it happen, which translates into spending a lot of dollars. This is the hard way. I don’t play WoW very much, but I have great respect for Blizzard’s commitment to continually innovate their product on a technical level.

There’s also a third option, and it’s the one I personally hope Square Enix is working on, because they are one of the only MMORPG developers big enough to fund it: A new MMORPG. One to replace FFXIV, as FFXIV replaced FFXI. One that hopefully throws out all the technical debt that FFXIV has accumulated, and starts anew.

P.S. This is when I’m kind of glad I haven’t implemented comments yet, because this is one of those posts that might inspire a lot of strongly-worded letters to the editor, along the lines of: “My favorite game is not stagnating!”

Firewatch and other games I’m currently playing: ie. The Surge, Hellpoint, and Greedfall.

I debated whether or not to even upload Firewatch, but since I’m running out of videos, I needed something to fill the upload hopper until I finish some other games. Firewatch isn’t a great recording game, because it’s just watching me listen to the same story everyone else saw. There’s so much incidental voiceover dialog that there isn’t much room for commentary, and not much to talk about anyway, except ongoing speculation or criticisms of the plot. There’s no “gameplay” to suss out.

Anyway while everyone else is playing Mass Effect again, I’m playing The Surge, which is a relatively good Souls-like, except for the bosses, which range from disappointing to infuriating. Fortunately there’s only five of them. The bulk of the game is exploration. Hoping to finish it this weekend.

After that I’ll probably tackle Hellpoint, which is a very low-budget Souls-like, but also a surprisingly good one. At least in the beginning. It really captures the spirit of discovery and exploration and mystery of a Souls game, but in a creepy alien environment. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what the Souls series was.

I also started Greedfall, so that’s waiting to be finished. Greedfall sits somewhere in the “not great, but not bad” area. It’s somewhat like Mass Effect, in that it’s mostly just jogging from cut scene to cut scene and clicking on dialog choices, most of which are the linear “illusion of choice” non-branching kind. But occasionally you get to decide whether someone lives or dies.

All of those probably total up to a solid month of playing time before I could even think about buying the Mass Effect Legendary edition.

Since I was experimenting with Stadia, it seemed fitting to try out Amazon Luna for comparison. It was only a seven day free trial, though. Also, it was noticeably worse quality than Stadia. Also, you have to pay for an early access subscription. Also, it had far less good games available for free. In summary, not a lot of pros with Amazon Luna.