I’ve been avoiding finishing my third and final (at least for the foreseeable future) Dragon Age: The Veilguard campaign because some of the things that happen around end game stick in my craw. I don’t know if I want to go through them again right now. Also, my keyboard (a Steelseries Apex 5) is doing this weird thing where the w key doesn’t work quite right.

I’ve had the keyboard problem before. Just do a hard reset of the keyboard (hold down the media button and the scrollwheel above it at the same time while re-connecting the USB) with the GG software running.

No joy. I can get w to work if I press on the lower right corner, but it dies in action if I press it any other place. I think I finally mashed it to death.

Makes for some tedious action gaming.

Conan Exiles

I’ve been concentrating on my Conan Exiles build: Aresburg. One of my favorite fictional settings has always been the Bay Bridge (I believe) in a future San Francisco as portrayed by William Gibson. People unable to afford the luxury of housing in the city began affixing makeshift dwellings to the bridge’s structure, resulting in a unique city within a city, fraught with the dangers of living in a potentially unstable lean-to high above freezing water.

The entire concept of my Aresburg build is a city built up on and around an old fortress long abandoned and in a state of disrepair. Ares and his thralls moved in, shored up the bits that needed shoring, then got to work building and expanding on the bones of what already existed.

This expansion includes spanning several bodies of water, so I decided to take a shot at a massive bridge that might be used to move large numbers of troops, but still offer some security against a force marching in the other direction.

Once I had the essential framework of the bridge complete, I started slapping wooden structures all over the place, trying to bring Gibson’s idea of the bridge as a thriving community to the Exiled lands.

It’s still very much a work in progress, but building is remarkably free of button-mashing anxiety, and I find I can manage to float around in any direction, even forward.

I’m not necessarily the best at building patiently. I tend to slap things together and then refine as I go. Consequently, I find I often don’t plan far enough ahead to get good verticality in my builds. I didn’t pay enough attention to stability as I was slapping pieces together.

As the Spanway is built on and around the shell of a very large – but basic – bridge, I knew I needed to do a lot better with the planning this time around. So far, it has paid off. There are some alarming red blotches here and there, but I have room to build enough little platforms, huts, and even full-scale houses to accomplish the feel I’m trying to achieve: a little city of necessity slapped together by people with nowhere else to go.

What’s a city without a pub? Of course there’s a pub up top, and I couldn’t let an opportunity to acknowledge where the idea of the bridge came from in the first place.

Sorry about the pun, Mister Gibson. I’m also fond of Spider Robinson.

Survival Mania

Man cannot live by Conan alone. At least I can’t. While I wait a fully-functional w key, I decided to take a look at a few other survival and building games I had in my library, and even picked up a promising new one in pre-release.

The graphics in V Rising grabbed me as soon as I saw the preview shots and gameplay videos on Steam. I was a goth kid back in the 80s. I’ve left the black wardrobe far behind, but vampires will always have a place in my heart.

I also… really suck at this game. So far. A lot of it has to do with the camera angle. It’s an isomorphic view, so kind of top down but not directly overhead (for those of you who needed that defined. Sorry.). The graphics are smooth, and objectives are pretty straightforward. But I spend all my time trying to adjust the camera so I can see more in front of my character than down onto the ground.

I find I have to scroll so far back from my character to play the the graphics are lost on me for most of the time. I’m either going to find a mod to give me some control over camera angle, finally get over it, or I won’t have much to say about V Rising. I hope that isn’t the case. It seems pretty fun.

I bought Ark: Survival Evolved a few weeks back and have been slowly getting used to that. Other than Conan Exiles, I don’t have any survival game experience to compare and contrast. Once I’ve played enough that I can write about ARK without every sentence being a direct comparison and contrast to Conan, I’ll probably have way too much to say about it.

Finally, I just picked up a license for the pre-release of Enshrouded, a survival and building game with a more fantasy and magic setting. So far, I’ve just dinked around with it for a few minutes, but I love the feel of the game and am looking forward to more.

As the game is in pre-release, I’m not sure how much I will be allowed to say. I’ll have to read up on that as I explore more. I suspect I’ll be spending a good deal of time with Enshrouded in the not-to-distant future.

Music

Meanwhile, meanwhile… a lot of music therapy lately, blasting house music directly into my tired old ear holes. Nothing quite like it. I have a couple two-hour sets ready to go, and will likely have a couple more within the week.

Still looking for a reliable time to stream on a regular basis. Right now, I’m flipping the stream on any time I run through one of the finished sets, but definitely not when I’m putting together a new one.

I spin most of the basic EDM genres, from breaks to tech house, dance to mainstage. Most of my time is spent with tech house and bass house. They both make for inspiring brawling music, if you’re looking for that sort of thing.

The DJ controller requires no w key, so all safe on that count.

Game Backlog

I can’t really drop big bucks on the latest and greatest games all the time. Plus, like too many gamers, I have this large backlog of games I played briefly, but then put down because I was already too into something else. Good games! Interesting games.

Just not… the brand newest games.

On the off chance I might bore the few people reading a gaming blog written by a Gen X autistic streaming DJ, it’s quite possible my next stream of gaming posts (post w fix) will involve the Yakuza series, or Guardians of the Galaxy.

Eh… I have a controller. I’ll scratch the itch somehow.