Game completed: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Anniversary Edition

I had been feeling the itch to replay Skyrim for weeks. but I kept ignoring it until the Anniversary Edition released. Thanks, Bethesda, for (like EA) giving me a reason to replay this! :D As part of my own Skyrim anniversary celebration I bought and downloaded the new edition while watching the Anniversary Concert.

I played completely unmodded for the first time in years (since Special Edition released tbh) and it was with both bittersweet nostalgia and amazement that I rediscovered all the bugs and glitches. You'd think that they'd take the time to do some bug fixing while polishing up the game for a new release, especially if said new release is going to break all the mods and fan-made bug patches. But no such luck. I'm just happy I play on PC where I can just bust out some console commands to bypass bugs and solve them manually. 

When Anniversary Edition was first announced I read through the official FAQ to get a picture of what the AE would include and what made it different from the other Skyrim releases, and from that I got the idea that Anniversary Edition would be a brand new release. But when release day came I realised that that wasn't the case. For consoles it's a brand new separate game. For PC they released it as a DLC for Special Edition. I'd had the idea that I could keep my Special Edition separate from my Anniversary Edition and thus have one modded game and one un-modded game, but no such luck. 

The main difference between AE and SE is that AE includes all the Creation Club content, which is basically paid mods. Since I have never paid attention to the Creation Club before it was all brand-new for me. There are, in total, 74 Creations and all of them are included in the Anniversary Edition. 

And man, was it a nostalgia trip!

My favourites were all of the slightly more lengthy questlines: 
• Forgotten Seasons
• Saints and Seducers
• The Gray Cowl Returns
• Ghosts of the Tribunal
• The Cause
But basically I also really enjoyed anything that made me go "oh hello, I remember you" from previous ES games (Wraithguard, Sunder, Goldbrand, Shadowrend, Chrysamere, Knights of the Nine...). Umbra was a nice reaquaintance and along with Kaarstag, the Reaper and the Ebony Warrior, one of the toughest enemies in the game. 

Forgotten Seasons was completely Dwemer inspired, and I do love everything Dwemer. Solving the puzzles and finding all the pieces to get my Dwarven Crown, and Dwarven Horse (hello, ESO), as well as shutting down the weather machine was very enjoyable and one of the first major Creations that I jumped into on this playthrough. 

Saints and Seducers is a series of quest relating to the Shivering Isles DLC from Oblivion. Such a nostalgia trip, but not really made for a low-level character as I found out the hard way. The first Saints camp was pretty close to Whiterun and so I ran over there pretty early in the game and got my ass handed to me on a plate. The enemies hurt like hell, so I resolved to wait to do this questline until I had leveled up a bit, which turned out to be somewhere at the end of the Civil War. 

The Gray Cowl Returns was a callback to the Oblivion Thieves Guild, and it was a nice stealth/heist quest that I really enjoyed doing. The reward, of course, was the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal, which I never used because it made all the guards hostile on sight. 

Ghosts of the Tribunal was the last CC questline I had left and it was such a Morrowind nostalgia trip, with so many Morrowind items and fashion and weapon styles from the Morrowind game. This questline made me want to pick up Morrowind again. Running around with the cult of Almelexia, killing a cultist of Dagoth Ur and saving the temple from Ash Zombies... My Skyrim character even looked straight out of Morrowind when I was done with this questline! xD

The Cause was the return of the Mythic Dawn from Oblivion. Complete with an Oblivion Gate and a trip to the Deadlands. I hated the Deadlands in Oblivion, to the point where I started to run in the opposite direction if I noticed an Oblivion Gate opening. It was way too repetitive! But for this Creation I ended up being kind of disappointed that it didn't have me run up towers to destroy Sigil Stones. Instead the way to close the opened Oblivion Gate was much more simple. This creation also featured a borderline lore-breaking trip inside an Ayleid ruin. The Ayleids never got as far north as Skyrim, which was firmly Dwemer territory. But they kind of got around it by placing the entrance to the Ayleid ruin far inside a cave system that started in the southern mountains of the Rift. Which would place the Ayleid ruin somewhere in the northern mountains of Cyrodiil... Probably somewhere east of Bruma. I wish this questline were longer, because it felt a little rushed, but it still ended up being one of my favourites. 

Everybody talked about the addition of fishing for this edition. I dislike fishing in any game, but I gave it my best effort in Skyrim. The first few fishing quests I completed as intended, by going to a specific location and then fish until I got the different kinds of fish that the quest asked for and then handed it in to the questgiver. But it soon became exactly as mind-numbingly boring as fishing is in any context, and when that happened I turned to the console and just added whatever they asked for to my inventory via console commands and handed in the quest. The only fun thing added by the fishing Creation was the quests concerning crazed mudcrabs. Although the end was kind of disappointing. I wanted something Cthulhu-esque to come out of the Sea of Ghosts and instead it was just a massive spirit mudcrab. Although I guess it was fun to use catapults instead of just peppering the enemy with arrows, and it was kind of fun to watch ridiculous amounts of soldier NPCs get slaughtered by frenzied mudcrabs xD

The farming Creation was kind of fun, but the quest leading up to actually owning a farm and managing it was really just a downer. 

I enjoyed the addition of the Wild Horses and especially the unicorn, which gave me all sorts of nostalgia feelings towards Oblivion, and I exclusively used the unicorn after I got it. Even the Dwemer Horse had to take the backseat in favour of the unicorn. 

In the Bittercup Creation I chose wrong and ended up with a very short and simple quest that didn't do much in terms of story or content. I read up on it afterwards and honestly, not making a choice at all seems like the best choice in terms of story. 

Unholy Vigil was another quest I enjoyed while doing it but the end of it just made it fall flat. Like that's it? We're done? Already? The way to get to the disappointing ending was a lot of fun though. Kind of like a detective story concerning the Vigilants of Stendarr. The start of this quest is a bit buggy though. The Hall of the Vigilants is destroyed after you reach level 10 if you have Dawnguard DLC installed and the letter that starts the quest is originally on a table, but supposed to fall underneath the table... Instead it's stuck inside the table so you kind of have to noclip to get to it. Thanks, Google. Story was awesome. Ending sucked. 

There were also so many new houses in AE! Like damn, so many. The first one I used was the Tundra Homestead just next to Whiterun, but it soon became too small. I started to consider building a Hearthfire mansion like usual, but then I came across Hendraheim and used that for the longest time. Until I did the quest Guests for Dinner (which was so obviously a trap) and at the end got the house Bloodchill Manor, which (unsurprisingly) became my favourite Skyrim house ever. And I used that for everything, including the petting zoo added by the Pets of Skyrim Creation. Mystwatch was also really cool and reminded me of the wizard tower house in Oblivion. 

In this playthrough I decided to do everything the base game had to offer on top of all the new content. Including all the Ritual Spell quests and all the minibosses. I had done Destruction and Restoration Ritual Spell quests before, but I had never bothered with Conjuration, Illusion or Alteration. I bothered a bit more with them this time around but not enough to get them to max level... Console, here I come. Conjuration was a pretty fun quest. When it comes to minibosses I had fought Karstaag and the Reaper before, though never on the same playthrough, but amazingly I had never fought the Ebony Warrior before. Because he just never bothered showing up during my playthroughs where I got past level 80. He didn't this time either. I jumped around all the hold capitals, waited around, got assaulted by several other spawns, but he just never showed. So I forced him to show up via console so I could do the fight and the last quest I had left. Karstaag is still the hardest miniboss in the game and the only one that actively requires kiting and a stock of healing potions/food and/or restoration magic. 

I had a lot of fun playing through Skyrim again and all the new content was definitely worth it. Now it's time to shelve Skyrim for the forseeable future and when I get that itch again the modding community will hopefully be up and running for the AE too :) 

New World - Amazon's flagship MMO

I wanted to wait a month after launch before I did this post, because my (limited) experience with MMO launches is that it's always a mess at the beginning, and New World was no different. It's been just over three weeks now and I can't wait any longer.

I played this in the Preview last year and in the Open Beta this year.

After the Preview I was skeptical of the entire game, but the trailer looked soooo good, I couldn't quite give up hope yet. After Open Beta I was hopeful and positive to the game. Granted, it had some issues, but I figured those would just be growing pains like any MMO has just after launch (even WoW and FF14 had those, and let's not even mention the mess that was ESO).

The first week was a mess. The servers were capped at 2000 people each and they had millions wanting to play. It wasn't feasible, and thus New World became Queue World. 

Playing on EU my queues were in the 1500-3000 people bracket, unlike the US servers which were in the 10k bracket, so I guess I lucked out on queueing just by being where I am xD But by the next week the queues were gone. It was so weird to be able to log in during prime time and just get straight into the game. 

To get rid of the queues they locked servers for new characters, rigorously kicked/banned people who were afk-running against walls, added more servers, and also upped the limit from 2k to 2,2k people in each server. But it worked. In the second week the queues were gone and so were the afk-runners.

Apart from the queueing and some small things I very much enjoyed the game in the beginning and I encountered very few bugs and glitches. For the first 2½ weeks I was in love with the game and couldn't wait until the next time I'd get to play. Unfortunately, as I levelled up and moved from the newbie zones to the more endgame zones I started to notice more and more small things that all added up to make my continued experience miserable. If it wasn't for the Company and my guild mates (both new and oldies from my ESO days) I don't think I would've continues to play for as long as I did.

The game is stunningly beautiful. Graphics and lighting are both amazing. But the skybox sucks. Stars and moon are static. There's a full moon every night. There's no gradual darkening or brightening as the sun goes up and down. It's just boom now it's dark, or boom now it's day. Morrowind in frickin 2002 could handle a proper day/night cycle. 

There are no NPC vendors. There's only the auction house and the economies in several servers tanked completely within the first three weeks. Basic mats are needed to craft high level stuff with high level mats so basic mats are sold at outrageous prices while literally everything else isn't worth squat. The crafting system seemed interesting and innovative and unique to start, but it has now become obvious that the pyramid style crafting doesn't really work. There's no use selling any of the useless gear you pick up. Instead you get to salvage them to get repair parts that you nees to be able to repair the gear you habe equipped, and trust me, you'll need it. To be able to fast travel you need a resource called Azoth which you can get as either loot or reward. And you'll want to fast travel because there are no mounts. Everything is taxed. Selling, buying, owning a house, fast travelling... Repairing your gear with repair parts from salvaged gear costs gold.

Questing was fun in the starter zones and the mid-tier zones, but once you got to the endgame zones the fun ended pretty abruptly. The enemies' respawn rates are ridiculous and players rarely manage to kill the mobs in and around an area to safely be able to loot it before the first few mobs have respawned again. And because they respawn so quickly it isn't unusual to get overwhelmed as the group you literally just fought joins the fray with the group you're currently fighting. Even with a high gear score and being several levels higher than the enemies they can still easily overwhelm and kill you. Because in endgame zones, even at 5 levels lower than you the enemies hit like trucks. It forces you to use your precious resources that aren't so easy to come by at the endgame because money is probably the rarest commodity in the game. Unless you're a tank you'll probably dodge a lot, but in the endgame zones the enemies are placed so close together that if you dodge out of reach for one enemy you'll accidentally aggro another. Ad infinitum.

All the questing in the game is still fetch and kill quests, but they're more baked into story so they feel better. That said, after you leave the newbie zones very little is voice acted, and you don't really form a relationship with any of the NPCs. You remember maybe one or two from the starter zones and after that it's just an endless blur of voiceless characters without personality.

The dungeons are stupid. There's no grouping tool so to get a group together you basically just stand around for an hour shouting in the chat. *Flashback to when ESO's dungeon finder didn't work* The first dungeon (Amrine) is very basic without much tactics needed. Don't be an idiot is basically all you need. The second dungeon (Starstone) requires a bit more. But not really tactics. If you focus the boss and just let the adds get caught in any AoE, you're golden. The third dungeon (Depths) is where things get tricky. But the middle boss is harder than the end boss and the only tactic you need for the end boss is to keep an eye out for when to dodge. The dungeons has one annoying mechanic. If you die once your team can revive you. If you die twice you can't be revived and have to respawn at the closest respawn point. Which effectively locks you out of any ongoing boss battle, which will prevent you from updating any quest objective involving defeating that boss. Which means you'll have to go through the dungeon again to finish any quests. Oh and you can't access the dungeon without a key. That you either get when you get a quest for said dungeon, or you have to craft it. 

In the endgame there's one world boss that requires a 20 people group to defeat, but you can only access the boss if you have the quest related to the boss. So you can't ask for help from anyone who isn't currently on that quest. And the quest isn't repeatable. 

I'm a INT build so logically/traditionally I should be running light armour. Not so in New World, because if you don't run heavy or at least medium you'll be too squishy for PvE. Even healers run medium... 

I haven't even talked about the PvP yet, but that's because I haven't done much of it. I've been too busy getting beat up in basic PvE to want to get beat up in PvP. Every time I play nowadays I feel like either the enemies are badly optimised or I just suck. But I've talked to several people who feel the same way about the endgame so maybe it's not me :P 

The game starts out so good and I had so much fun that I could easily overlook all the little things. But the little things add up and by the time I was approaching the endgame I couldn't ignore them anymore. The starter zones have recieved so much love and care from the devs, obviously much more than the endgame zones, that you (or at least I) couldn't help but get pulled in. The magic weakens after level 30 and by level 45 you're completely disillusioned. There's no incentive for people to keep playing after level 60. Other MMOs struggle with endgame too, but in New Worls there's basically nothing. There's the PvP wars, I guess. But unless you know someone in the warring company you're unlikely to get a spot in the war. 

I want to love this game. I wanted it to be the new game that took the place of ESO. Something new I could play for years. But the way things are now I don't know for how much longer I'll play. The guildies keep me going at the moment. 

I miss concerts T_T

Two weeks ago Facebook reminded me that it was two years since I went to my last Alice Cooper concert. September 27th, 2019. That was also the last concert I went to before covid hit. And I miss it so badly. Since 2006 I've been to at least one concert pretty much every year (that's including festivals) and somehow the thing I've missed the most while the world was ending was to be pressed against a whole lot of people jumping and screaming to my favourite musicians. 

When the world closed in March of 2020 I was still hopeful that I'd get to go to my annual festival that June. How bad could it be, was what most seemed to be thinking. But here we are 1½ years later and I've missed TWO festivals since then, because both 2020 and 2021 got cancelled and I don't even want to think about how many potential concerts there could have been...

The best memories I have from concerts are:

• Lordi in Malmö 2006. My first ever concert and it was just an amazing experience.

• Edguy in Malmö 2009. I was up front to the stage and cried when they played King of Fools.

• Disturbed in Copenhagen 2010. First time seeing them and it was a great show.

• Alice Cooper in Stockholm 2011. My first ever Cooper show and I was so happy.

• Lordi at Sweden Rock Festival 2016. First Lordi show in eight years! I cried when they played Blood Red Sandman.

• Twisted Sister at Sweden Rock Festival 2016. Farewell tour and I was so happy to finally get to see them.

• Sabaton at Sweden Rock Festival 2016. One of the best concerts I've been to.

• Edguy at Sweden Rock Festival 2017. Once again I cried when they played King of Fools.

• Aerosmith at Sweden Rock Festival 2017. I was sitting by the other stage waiting for Edguy and just watched the show on the huge monitors. When they started to play I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing the whole festival area started to sing along whether they were attending the concert or not. It was magical.

• In This Moment at Sweden Rock Festival 2018. Probably the best concert of the year.

• Amon Amarth at Sweden Rock Festival 2019. The whole show was just incredible. 

I've seen Alice Cooper live five times (2011, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019). Disturbed, Lordi and Edguy three times each. Within Temptation and Nightwish two times each. 

Due to how things were in 2020 and in 2021 a lot of musicians started doing virtual live shows. Lordi was one of the first that I heard of and of course I was there for their Scream Stream. If that counts, then I've seen Lordi four times (and Cooper 2019 wasn't my last concert). I missed both of Within Temptation's and Nightwish's virtual shows due to work. 

I can't wait to get back into the concert crowds and fight my way to the front. Can't wait to get pressed against the fence and have my ears blasted by too loud music, while I'm screaming my throat raw and killing all my muscles by jumping and waving and headbanging for two hours straight. It's gonna be great.

And if everything can just keep going in the right direction then the next concert I have planned is an Alice Cooper show in Gävle next year. Seems almost poetic if I can have both my last concert before covid and my first concert after covid be Cooper. 

My seen live playlist on Spotify consisting of Lordi, Edguy, Nightwish, Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Disturbed, Children of Bodom, Dir En Grey, Mustasch, All That Remains, Girugamesh, MUCC, DragonForce, Evergrey, In Flames, Lamb of God, Sabaton, Within Temptation, HammerFall, Dark Tranquillity, Avatar, Korn, Motorhead, Soilwork, Amaranthe, Black Sabbath, Rob Zombie, Alter Bridge, W.A.S.P., Arch Enemy, Powerwolf, Motley Crue, Toto, Airbourne, Hardcore Superstar, Thin Lizzy, Helloween, The Ark, The Sounds, Queen, Twisted Sister, The Hellacopters, Avantasia, Blind Guardian, Sixx:A.M., The Struts, Aerosmith, Scorpions, Ratt, Steel Panther, Apocalyptica, Iced Earth, Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osbourne, Stone Sour, Turbonegro, Tarja, In This Moment, Nazareth, Pain, H.E.A.T., The 69 Eyes, Kiss, Def Leppard, ZZ Top, Tenacious D, Amon Amarth, Three Days Grace, Black Stone Cherry, and Indica.

Dealing with backlog: The Watch Dogs series

I've wanted to try my hands at these games for a while. I like a lot of Ubi's other stuff, so why wouldn't I like this? Open world adventure, kind of RPG... Sounds like my kind of stuff. So I got the first two games on this year's Steam Summer Sale. 

Watch_Dogs: I went into the first game expecting fun and possibly greatness. Instead I got a pretty cliché and mediocre story, gameplay that was pretty meh, and a main character about as interesting as watching paint dry. And he was fragile. Like damn. Jason in Far Cry 3 is more durable, and that's saying something. I shelved this game after ten hours. I just couldn't. There was nothing about this game that made me excited to play it. No sense of "I can't wait to go back in". It was just an overly meh experience. And annoying at times. Feels like everything I did during those ten hours was timed. Everything. I hated that timer. 

Watch_Dogs 2: I was skeptical towards  this game from the very beginning since I didn't like the first one, but decided to give it a shot. Already from the get-go this was a lot better than the original and I enjoyed my time in this game a lot more. But I never got to the point of "oh I can't wait to play some more!". It was always more like "Oh I guess I'll play some whatevs". At the time of writing this I still haven't completed the game but I also haven't played it at all for almost a month. I feel no incentive to go back in and play some more. I had some fun with it, there were some cool moments, and awesome characters, but mostly I just feel pretty meh about it. Wrench is best boi. I don't care about the rest.

I fully expected to finish these two and then head into Legion. But the way I've felt about these two games makes me not even want to pick up Legion. 

Mobile games

I keep getting pulled into these. Especially since they become better and better with each new generation of mobile phone. I've already talked about the two major Potter games, as well as PoGo, Fire Emblem Heroes and Mystic Messenger, but there are a few more that I've played around with. 

Matchington Mansion. This was my obsession for the better part of a year until now. It's a match-three game where every completed level allows you to redecorate/renovate a part of a mansion. I've put so much time into this, to the point where I finished every room in the mansion and I thought the game would be over, but instead it turns into some kind of open world match-three decorating game. When you finish the mansion you leave on a boat only to discover a tropical island (right next to a mansion that has a pine forest?) and you start helping the stranded hermit there repair his island villa. The hermit turns out to be a rockstar. It's weird. I stopped pretty soon after that.

Project Makeover. I started this while I was still deep into Matchington Mansion. It's basically the same game of match-three. But instead of redecorating a big house you're "redecorating" people. I didn't get very far into this since I was still grinding through Matchington Mansion. But I might pick it up again at some point.

Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells. This game has the Potter name on it, so of course I tried it. I didn't do much more than the first couple of levels, though. It's another match-three and Matchington filled that spot.

Choices. Several years ago I tried a game called Episodes and this seemed like a new, better and upgraded version of Episodes. It's basically a simulation game of interactive novels. A virtual novel game. It's super girly. And potentially super naughty. And super dumb. I did have some mindless fun with this, but like most of these interactive novel games they don't last very long.

Immortal Diaries. My current obsession. It's a dating sim and a dress-up game, but also an interactive novel,  but also kind of RPG-ish with levels and attributes and boss fights. The story is that you're an orphan who grows up at an orphanage until you're eighteen and a man comes to the orphanage and hands you your inheritance which is partly the deed to an old castle where the man works as a butler, and partly the inheritance that is in your blood. Your father had been a vampire of an ancient powerful bloodline. Your mother was human. As you learn to navigate the new world of vampires you also get to awaken and learn to use your dormant genetic powers inherent to your bloodline, all the while trying to avoid getting killed by enemies who don't wish to see your bloodline survive. The lore is nothing new, but also an amalgamation of a lof of different vampire lores. Super interesting how they've put it all together tbh. The character called Adrian looks deceptively like Dan Stevens, and the character called Nina looks strangely like Nina Dobrev. My favourite character is Marcus, but Adrian gives me all the right chills. The voice acting is amazing too. 

New World open beta

After I managed to get into the Preview last year I tried my hardest to get into the Closed Beta, but without any success. So when the Open Beta started I immediately applied for that and got in (ofc I did it's the open beta). From Thursday to Sunday this past week I exclusively played New World alongside friends Tio and Squirrel. 

The start was pretty much exactly the same as in the preview, although they had changed the tutorial a bit. There are still four different starting zones and they're random, so you don't have a choice where you end up which makes it pretty hard to do the first few quests alongside friends. Initially, Tio and Squirrel got lucky and ended up in the same starter zone, while I ended up somewhere completely different. So I ended up traversing half the map as a level 2 character to get to them only to realize that the first few quests aren't the exact same and so can only be completed in the area where you start. I had no way back to my starter zone, so I tried to die only to not be able to revive at my starter zone. So I ended up deleting my first character, remade her exactly the same and by some miracle ended up in the same starter zone as my friends. New World is a hassle if you want to play with friends from the very start. Around level 10 you'll have unlocked enough to go to the other three starting zones and do stuff together. 

The character creator has also been improved a lot and now not every character looked the same. In the Preview you could only choose between being male or female and then all the character models were the same. The character creator wasn't as detailed as some other MMOs but still a lot better than what it was. 

The zones are made for 10-20 levels each. So the starting zones have areas from level 1 to level 25, which makes some areas crazy dangerous to accidentally wander into as a low level, and sometimes a level 24 area can be found right next to a level 3 area. The level scaling is a bit wonky. The first four areas (i.e. the starter zones) allows you to play around with weapons and builds as much as you want, but if you don't have a specific build in mind when you enter the next tier areas you will get spanked by the enemies. The change in difficulty between level 24 enemies and level 26 enemies is pretty steep. Which I got to discover first-hand. I got to level 30 before the beta ended and played around with sword and shield, bow and arrow, musket, life staff, fire staff and ice gauntlet. Finally settling on a build with ice gauntlet as my main weapon during PvE and life staff for dungeons. (Although the life staff did come in handy during PvE as well).

Since the Preview they have added magic and made the combat more MMO-like. I lamented the lack of proper AoE attacks in the Preview, which made it difficult to combat more than one enemy at once, but now that was no trouble. There were some animation issues while in combat, for example the game wouldn't always register when the dodge button was pressed so only half the times a dodge would actually happen. 

I didn't encounter a lot of bugs, thankfully. The most frequent bug was the sound bug that usually happened during prolonged combat when the music would turn static and the character movements would just be completely silented. It sounded somewhat as if you had submerged yourself in water. This could be fixed (for some reason) by opening your inventory and then closing it again, which you can't do during combat because opening your inventory makes your character unable to move. Another bug I encountered was the quest Under the Same Stars, where one container just wouldn't spawn the quest item needed to progress. There was one bug that I didn't encounter until the very last day of the beta and that was that my character would suddenly get stuck in their last animated pose. So I couldn't move my character at all. Once I had to use the /unstuck command to be able to move again, but usually it could be solved by dodge-rolling out of it. Also, this happened and I don't know why, but logging off, closing the game and restarting solved it.

They had worked on the PvE a bit too, most of the quests were still go here, kill this many and loot these things, but they were embedded in story now so it didn't feel as grindy. There were a lot of quests that stuck with me this time. I especially liked the pirate ones in First Light and the ones from Megara in Walsham/Marcel's Hamlet in Brightwood. Not because the gameplay of those quests was anything special, but because I enjoyed their stories. 

Since I got to play for a lot longer this time around (40½ hours of beta versus 12½ hours of preview) I also got to really appreciate how diverse the zones were. All zones had their own distinct feel to them. From the pirate themed First Light, to the very Bloodborne-inspired Brightwood. From the cliffy and sea-salted Monarch's Bluff, to the swampy Cutlass Keys. Going into Brightwood for the first time was an experience. From the mostly sunny starter zones into the misty, creepy Brightwood where the first thing I encountered was a dilapidated village filled with ghosts. 

This time around I also got to a high enough level to do both my first dungeon and my first corruption breach world event. I feel like I did well enough healing my first ever dungeon in New World, but I definitely need some practice. 

All three of us were wowed enough by how New World was now that we all decided to buy the game when it comes out. I bought it after the third day of beta. Unfortunately it releases on a Tuesday of my night shift week so I rpobably won't get to play much during the first week after release. Hopefully it won't get delayed again, because now I really feel like I need more New World gameplay in my life. 

Game completed: Generation Zero

So last night we finished Generation Zero (jokingly dubbed "the Sweden game" in one of my discord servers). All in all we had a good run. We both had fun playing the game, and I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the whole thing. We both agree that the devs had really succeeded in making the game feel like Sweden. 

For the first ten hours or so we had a lot of fun reading all the labels on everything and all the signs. It felt so bizarre to see and hear Swedish in a game. Being in a country where hardly anything gets dubbed/translated unless it's specifically for children it becomes pretty rare to see or hear your language in games. But there was soooo much Swedish and it was so weird and hilarious in the beginning. 

One of our few gripes with the game, though, is that you could have all the sound in Swedish, but you couldn't choose to have the subtitles or UI in Swedish, so before we got used to it it was pretty jarring to hear and read Swedish but everything around it was in English. 

The story is that you're a teenager who wakes up on a beach after a party on an island only to discover that everyone is gone. The world seems empty of people, and everywhere you go there are robots trying to murder you. You find a gun in the nearby police car and then you head out trying to find out where the robots came from and where all the people have gone. 

We have a few gripes with the story progression. While it all makes sense it got very repetitive very quickly. We both hated bunkers at the end, because there were so many of them and at least half of them were huge sprawling things leading down into the earth for what felt like miles with lots of corridors all looking the same so we got turned around and confused a lot. Another gripe is the sidequests. Basically all the sidequests are like "Find out what happened at this place" and you go there and the end result is "Oh, they died." For the duration of the base game you are the only survivor and from feeling kind of cool it soon becomes pretty incredulous. Like all these police and military have been killed by the robots, nobody survived... Except this teenager with a machine gun. Wtf. Third gripe is that the story made sense and worked out until the very end. The ending was very... "That's it? But, but, but... Now what? There's so much left unresolved!" But we figured that everything would be resolved by the end of the DLCs.

Alpine Unrest DLC was pretty cool, but we both got so sick of the Apocalypse class robots. Like telling the Hunters to "Stop BBQing me!! T_T" and everything was radioactive so everything hurt. Oof. The whole island was really cool and there were a lot of fun things to discover and explore (not so many bunkers) and we got some more backstory for the robots. And omg there are people here. Actual, real NPCs. Hooray! The story had a really sudden end though. To the point that none of us realized it was over at first. 

FNIX Rising DLC was probably my favourite. We found out exactly where the robots came from and who controls them and how that came to happen. The FNIX class robots were tough, but not annoyingly so like the Apocalypse ones. The whole DLC was action from start to finish. But once again the ending left too much unsaid and unresolved. These devs seem great at making stories, but not at finishing them. Maybe it's a way to leave people wanting more? But it's done wrong and it's mostly just frustrating than omg I need to know more.

Level is capped at 31, which seems a frustratingly odd number to cap it on. There was a point midway through levelling that things got really fricking hard. We were both left completely frustrated at how things were going for us. Then we got our first Experimental class weapon and suddenly we started to breeze through a lot of things. Some epic fights happened later, but they were epically awesome and not just awfully frustrating. There's an annoying amount of inventory management too, mostly because you kind of need to pick up everything so you can craft things, but everything has a weight and your character is just your average teenager so their carry ability isn't great. I absolutely hated that ammo was weighted. Especially since I favoured the Pvg sniper and its ammo weighs a shit ton. 

The lore in this game was great and I enjoyed discovering all the little bits and pieces from notes and photos and cassettes. The game takes place in the late 1980s so a lot of the technology and logos were very nostalgic for us. I didn't exist in the 80s, but a lot of those things stayed around for ten more years so I remember a lot of it. 

All in all it was a fun game, but it left a few things to be desired and many things were super repetitive. We still had fun with it, though, and I could imagine playing it again. 

Happy Back to Hogwarts day!

So it's September 1st and that means two things: 1). That summer is officially over, and 2). It's Back to Hogwarts day. 

This year it's 20 years since the first movie released and I can't believe it. I still remember going online and reading up on all the rumours of who was getting cast as which character and where they were going to film etc. It was insanely big already back then. Before the movies. Like imagine how big it got after the movies and then imagine that it was already huge before that. It's crazy. 

Unfortunately I don't remember when and where I watched the first movie. If it was at the cinema or on VHS at home. I think I saw it at the cinema and later I bought the dubbed version of the movie so my sister could watch it with me (back when the VHS tapes usually only had one version on each tape). Except she didn't care much xD 

I still remember the pre-movies Harry Potter merch we had and I kind of wish we didn't have to lose that in favour of WB merch. The original merch was quirky and magical and extremely book-literal. Or I may just be a Ravenclaw being salty over the fact that all my merch has the wrong animal on it.

But I've done so much in the past 20+ years of being a Potterhead, and while I'm not obsessing (as much) anymore it's still deeply and intricately a part of me ♥ I've even read the first book in Japanese ^^;

• I've been to Platform 9 3/4 in London twice. (Post and post)
• I've been to the Studio Tour. (Post and picture post)
• I've been to The Exhibition. (Post)
• I've gone to two conventions. (Post and post)
• I've been to the Harry Potter part of the Guiness World Records museum in Copenhagen. (Post)
• I saw the last movie at the cinema twice. (Post and post)
• I've played the Harry Potter games (Post and post)
• I loved the Cursed Child. (Post)
• Fantastic Beasts is just an excuse to dress up and obsess (Post)
• I own the Wizards Collection. (Post)
• I have a lot of stuff (more now). (Post)
• Picture bomb.

Apart from all of that I also distinctly remember two other Harry Potter related events in my life. One was in 2002 when I celebrated my 12th birthday by inviting a few friends and then my parents took us all to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets at the cinema. A movie I subsequently watched so much that my VHS tape became all scratchy and jumpy. And I remember queueing for the midnight release of the Deathly Hallows in 2007. It was the first time I had been able to do that and it was absolutely amazing.

Over 20 years of Harry Potter in my life and here's to 20 more!

Summer of Horror

It wasn't scary. We just watched a lot of horror movies. 

A little over three weeks ago my boyfriend broke his ankle. At this point I still had 1½ weeks left of my summer break. Ironically it happened on the one day I wasn't home because I was out getting my first covid vaccination shot. As luck would have it.

Anyway, during that last week we watched seven horror movies pretty much back to back. It all started with Fear Street of Netflix. All of the movies were on Netflix.

1. Fear Street: Part 1 - 1994. We both really, really liked this movie. It was really neat as a horror movie in that it didn't feel like it fed into all the tropes and yet it had the slasher like in Scream, and the unkillable killer like in Halloween, and the witch/ghost paranormal experience. The fact that it takes place in the mid-90s somehow made it even better as we just sat there and commented on the fashion and the technology and had a great time. The setup of the rivalry between Shadyside and Sunnydale was great, the buildup of the legend around Sarah Fier was amazing, and the reveal that this happens with a set amount of years ebtween each time felt very IT. All the little pieces fit together beautifully. It wasn't too gory (except that one part in the end where one person gets their head chopped to pieces in a fish-chopper), and the suspense was great without actually getting boring. 

2. Fear Street: Part 2 - 1978. This one was very much like a homage to Halloween. It felt like a classic despite being brand-new. There was a nice twist at the end that neither of us expected. Apart from the bits and pieces that continued to build the legend around Sarah Fier, this was a pure slasher movie. But there were several hints in this movie that something else was behind what was going on, and it was an awesome use of foreshadowing for the third movie. Just perfect storytelling.

3. The Bye Bye Man. While waiting for the third part of Fear Street to come out we turned to other horror movies. We had had our eyes on this one for a while and so finally decided to watch it. Loved the buildup of suspense throughout, but boyfriend pointed out that he missed having a background story for the villain (spoiled from Fear Street?) and I very much agreed. There wasn't enough legend surrounding the evil, it was just there doing its thing and people got caught up in it. Still it was a solid horror movie with an ending completely open for more. The internet doesn't agree with us that it was solid, but we both enjoyed watching it. Our only gripe was the lack of detail. 

4. The Ritual. I mean, this takes place in the wilderness of northern Sweden so of course it was a given that we would watch it at some point. Robert James-Collier is in it and I just keep thinking of him as Thomas. He will forever be Thomas. So we have four ridiculously British guys attempting to hike through the Swedish wilderness in Sarek National Park (according to their map), but one of them hurts his knee and can't stop bitching about it so they decide to take a shortcut through the woods instead of continuing along the hiking trail. Bad idea. In the woods they come across runes and wooden idols and a deer strung up on the trees. They spend the night in an abandoned cabin and all wake up from really weird nightmares. After that they all become increasingly aware that something is very, very wrong in the woods and that something is hunting them. Like most horror movies the setup is great, the suspense is amazing, and then comes the reveal and the conclusion and it all falls flat on its face. I really, really enjoyed this movie up until the last twenty minutes or so. But kudos to the film makers for doing a good job with the rendition of the folklore/legend/mythology. 

5. Army of the Dead. This was (for the most part) a pretty standard zombie movie tbh. What makes it stand out is how the infection got loose (an escaped military experiment), the fact that the alpha zombies are sentient and intelligent and basically leaders of a new civilization/race/nation, and that the entire movie takes place after the zombie threat has been contained. The opening credits show the beginning of the zombie threat and how the people fought against them etc etc. But when the movie starts that part is over. The zombies are contained in a sealed off Las Vegas which is set to be nuked. But before that a rich guy tasks one of the fighters from the opening credits to assemble a team to break into a vault inside Vegas and steal a bunch of money. He does and off they go. Inside the cordon the mostly usual stuff in zombie flicks happen; people start dying, there's a traitor, someone has wandered off chasing their own goals, the traitor keeps screwing people over and they don't realise it, and then there's the leader trying to keep the operation smooth despite it all slipping through his fingers. It was fun, fast-paced, neither scary nor especially gory, and a completely standard zombie movie. 

6. Wounds. This whole movie felt like a prelude to something that didn't happen. There was barely any suspense just a slight tickling feeling that something was wrong, but it didn't get to suspense level. I spent the whole movie waiting for something to happen, but the entire thing felt like a buildup until the thing that makes everything happen and then nothing did and the movie ended. Super disappointing. This is like one of those artsy movies that's strange just for the sake of being strange that doesn't really do anything. There was a part in the middle that seemed like the strating point for things to happen, but it just died instead.

7. Fear Street: Part Three - 1666. The end of the story! I loved seeing the pieces come together. The legend of Sarah Fier explored and explained. Everything we learned in the first two movies came to use in this final movie as the ultimate showdown happened in the mall of Shadyside. It was a perfect ending to a great trilogy. Can't really say more than that or I'll spoil the whole thing. Action from start to finish and it was so good.