I’m a bit late on this update, so I’ll get right to it.

So, I may have spent about three hours just building up settlements, and failed to notice that my recording software stopped somewhere between me wrapping up my building and taking off from Sanctuary to handle yet another issue for another settlement, which in turn meant that the time that I spent getting to Diamond City was not recorded, either. Because of this, we pick things back up out in the Commonwealth, on the way to the Corvega assembly plant to, you guessed it, kill raiders on behalf of a settlement. Of course, nothing ever goes smoothly, and I run afoul of some of the wasteland’s vicious fauna on the way.

I can’t let Minuteman business distract me from the biggest problem on my plate too much though, so it’s time to (hopefully) mount a rescue. Buuuuut, crawling around this place in the middle of the night seems like a terrible idea, and I thankfully stumbled upon Goodneighbor, the town that the detective’s assistant told me about. The… greeting at the door wasn’t the greatest, but if the place has a room with a bed, a door, four walls, and a ceiling, it’ll do for a night.

With morning light, I set out after the detective once more, finding that I was much closer to my destination during the night than I realized. I don’t regret choosing to bed down though– better to do this now than when I can’t see six inches in front of my face without a flashlight (which I don’t really want to use in this place– the last thing I need is to give away my location to every hostile with eyes).

The detective ended up being something quite… different from what I expected. But, Ellie seemed like good people, and Piper didn’t object to me going to see him when he Mayor pointed me his way, and damn it, he was the only friendly face I’ve seen in that place other than the dog, and I brought him with me. I also have no idea what Donna or whatever her name was saw in that Skinny Malone character….

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TL;DR

Did lots of building that’s boring and no one wants to see, recording wasn’t on when I hit Diamond City, killed raiders and other stuff, hit Goodneighbor, and then went after Nick Valentine.

And I also screwed up the syntax on all the links. Fixed.

Well, it’s been an interesting week. I didn’t get much gameplay done this time around; the majority of my time was split between filling out job applications/doing job interviews, editing the videos from last week, and working out kinks in the modded Oblivion install that I plan to play eventually. I didn’t touch on either Grim Dawn or Fallout 4 this past week, and I only played Overwatch once, today, and only because a friend was playing and was looking to queue with a group. And then I forgot to record my highlights/PotG before I exited the game.

So, the Fallout 4 videos– I ended up giving up on the new video editor and going back to the old one. Since I’ve put up six videos on the current playthrough since the last post, I’ll just link the playlist rather than link them individually.

The one game that I ended up playing at any length was Stardew Valley. I figured that the best way to handle the video-making for SV is to log things week by week. So this first week is simply me settling in and finding a rhythm to building up Valinar farm. And, oh yeah, I forgot about taking screenshots. Again.

Lately, though, I’ve been tempted to play games other than the ones I set for myself. Like, I mentioned looking into Oblivion modding, and all that tinkering with that made me want to actually fire it up. I felt a similar urge to play Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Part of me also want to go play Starbound, since it’s officially released now. And I know that I technically can go ahead and play them, since the only rules I have to follow are ones that I created and can change if I wanted, but I feel like I shouldn’t. Especially since I’ve budged on my stance on images and videos, and made an exception to play Overwatch along with everything else.

I might need to rethink a lot of what I originally set out to do.

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TL;DR version: Busy week, not much gameplay. Playlist for Fallout 4 from last post. Played an in-game week of Stardew Valley, forgot the screenshots. Temptation to play games that are not Overwatch, Diablo III, or the games in the current batch. Might overhaul my method to handle the backlog.

Bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere. I hate bugs.

Good news: I played something other than Grim Dawn past this week: (Modded) Fallout 4.

Bad news: I had that bug where you press play, the game starts to launch, and then nothing. Even when the game wasn’t modded yet.

Better news: I reinstalled the game and got it to launch consistently as vanilla, before modding it for my playthrough.

Worse news: The bug came back with a vengeance and sent my first eight hours of gameplay down the drain.

Best (?) news: I killed the bug again (hopefully permanently this time) and restarted a new playthrough. I have another video for the new playthrough that I need to edit and upload– it would be done already, but I decided to try a new video editor. It has what feels like a steep learning curve, but I hope to be done by the end of today.

It wasn’t that great of a loss, honestly. I was growing mildly irritated with how my Sole Survivor looked with mods, I distributed my points that I got for levelling up in a way that wasn’t the best in hindsight. and nearly half of that eight hours was just me puttering around settlements, building things. In either case, I’m going to edit and upload the recordings from the dead playthrough over the next week or two, so that it won’t be a total waste.

I did play more Overwatch (surprise surprise), but not as much as I did the past couple of weeks; recording was scarce because one, didn’t play much, two, the majority of my play time was with other people in a voice chat that I didn’t want to record, and three, I got a(nother) bug where the FOV for Highlight/PotG/killcams is screwed up and doesn’t fix itself until you restart the game. And restarting the game clears out your highlights. So. shrugs What can you do?

That’s all that I’ve got for this week, so I’m off again!

Well, I ended up only playing Grim Dawn again this past week, but I played for longer than an hour. So, improvement.

A part of my time was spent simply grinding for experience and searching for better equipment from mob drops. I had… some success in that endeavor. I certainly got more experience, but not much in better gear. Eventually, though, I get back to completing the tasks that were given to me. Mainly, helping out the settlement with their non-Dead-related problems. Some were simple, only requiring me to be in possession of certain items (which I already had, thankfully). Others, though… well, you’ll see. Or may have already seen. Whichever.

With those tasks behind me, I’m given yet another mission (surprise, surprise), which once again sends me out into the wilderness, but not before I gain a few new abilities and tricks. Also, I gave in to an urge I felt from the beginning and cast aside my gun for a favorite weapon style from my first playthrough. I must say, I find combat more fun when it’s up close and personal.

Despite having my mission written in plain sight, I get a little be sidetracked by enemies that are not the risen Dead, or twisted beasts, but actual people. Or at least, they appear to be. It’s a bit funny (and by funny I mean sad), the things people would do to one another in the hellhole that this world has become. But, time waits for no one, no matter how much one wishes it to. Time to move on.

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In other news, I didn’t end up taking screenshots at all last week.

In other, other news, I played Overwatch again. A lot. A few links if anyone’s interested. I might upload more than highlights one of these days.

Anyway, I’m out of here for now. Later!

So, if there’s any saying out there that talks about plans only being as effective as the person executing said plans, it would apply to me this past week.

It’s not that I didn’t play any games. I did! Just… not as much as I would like, and not the game I intended to play, for the most part.

Out of the batch of six, I only played one game: Grim Dawn. For an hour. Yes, I know.

Starting over seems to have been a good idea, though.

I’ve already seen some things that were not present when I first played.

Though not all of the new things are… nice and friendly.

Does this remind you of anything?

There were a few times that I got turned around and doubled back on myself.

It was at this moment that I remembered that I was playing on Veteran Mode. It was also around the time that I decided that using a gun isn’t the most effective way to fight off everything trying to kill me.

As for what game was distracting me from all the others… it starts with over and ends with watch. I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.

Which brings me to my next point, I’m going back on one of the details I decided on before. I’m going to do mostly video clips with a few images, maybe one or two per game. I underestimated the effect of repeatedly hitting keyboard shortcuts would have on gameplay, and it would be a whole ‘nother story once I start in on a game that I play with a controller. Not to mention the fixed size of the images…. (Thanks to KroganAlly for pointing out an easy way to record. I didn’t realize that Windows 10 had that function built in.)

I think that covers everything that happened this week in terms of the backlog and gaming. Chances are, I won’t be doing anything tomorrow, with it being the 4th of July here in the United States. So, catch you later!

Edited because I forgot to name the game all those images are from.

So it begins. I was thinking about how I could keep a record of my progress. I thought about streaming, but I did a test stream once and didn’t feel comfortable doing it. I thought about recording it and posting it to Youtube, but it seems like a lot of work that I could put into playing more, and that’s not taking into consideration if something went wrong with the recording, or issues from false copyright claims and the like once it was posted. I settled on taking screenshots, and choosing a select few from each of my gaming sessions to post publicly on my Steam profile and on updates here. Simple enough, doesn’t take too much time from actually playing, minimal problems that can arise.

So to get more in-depth on how I plan to do this: I won’t care about 100% completion most of the time. I’m aiming for an end, if not a good end (if applicable). For instance, I will play out the four routes for good endings in Amnesia: Memories so that I can unlock the hidden route, but after I beat that hidden route, I’d consider the game done. I’m not going to go for every bad ending that the game has. Or in Skyrim, I have the majority of the achievements unlocked, but the ones I don’t will probably stay that way, because I don’t have enough interest in finishing the Dark Brotherhood, or the Thieves Guild, or being a Werewolf or a Vampire (Lord).

Also, I’m going to be starting these games over from the beginning, even if I have a save file on hand for them. Chances are, I won’t remember very much on what I was up to last on those old saves, so I’d much rather start fresh than wander around aimlessly in the more open-world games, or be stumped about what the overall goal of the game is in the more linear ones.

Which reminds me, I’m going to be unofficially including non-Steam games as well. Thinking about all of this made me realize that I never officially “beat” Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, or Mass Effect 3 (in the sense that, I played all three until I was about to pass the point of no return, then stopped playing for reasons that I don’t recall. I know how they end, though). Never finished SWTOR before KotFE became a thing either, but I don’t see myself going back anyway.

Anyway, this is going on a bit too long for right now, so I’ll leave things here.