I’ve had an awesome few months on the bike; stumbling across a video featuring Jennifer Kay’s rim brake SL6, which inspired me to buy and build my own, to then running into her at Centennial Park, to then connecting with her on Instagram, to then asking if she’d be interested having some quality studio shots of her bike, to then having her tell me she’d love to shoot her bike, but not the SL6, and instead her new SL8 (my dream bike!), to then saying fuck it, YOLO and putting my money down on an SL8, to then shooting her bike with Nick at an amazing photo studio in Alexandria (UNO Studios) and catching up with an old mate Mark Pakula (who was videographer for the day).

It’s been a wild ride.

Last night Hawk told me he bought Remnant 2 on Steam. Hawk, Jase and I played through Remnant 1, it was refreshingly good. I saw that Remnant 2 was on sale atm, so I wishlisted it and thought I’d try to convince Jase to also buy it so us 3 could play through it together.

Well just a few minutes ago I got a Steam notification that Vrsatyle had bought me a gift, and hey presto, it’s Remnant 2! I laughed out loud. Pinching myself. Life’s good!

Fratelli Fresh pappardelle wagyu ragu (so good!).

Mochi donuts.

Char and Hawk.

In case you didn’t know.

Nike RPRSNT!

Be horny!

Char bought these!

Sprung!

Destiny books!

Hawk’s haul.

Matcha time.

Got to catch up with Nick too. What a week!

Paradise Garage.

Lunch at Kosta’s. Their chips are sooo good.

Smash burger, not much to look at, but they’re legit.

It’s raining all week, and I’ve got Hawk and Char in town so I made the decision to not ride, and instead eat and drink a lot (why not!).

It’s Mia! Cute cat glass Gina got me in Italy. Char came over late (SO awesome to meet her IRL!), and I was pretty drunk at this point, so drunk I forgot to get a photo with her.

It’s been a great week! Gina and Shaun got back home from Europe on Monday, Nick is back from Shanghai and my good gaming friends Hawk from QLD and Chardae from NZ are in town! Adventure time!

It’s been a fun weekend of gaming with some old Diablo clannies! Weather was so nice this weekend, but decided to avoid the crowds at the park and play games instead.

I’ve always wanted face tatts. Season 4 Diablo IV.

First The Sandman, now Fallout. Pinching myself that they’ve made a live action TV show of a game series I consider to be one of, if not the best games I’ve ever played. I actually feel lucky to have lived long enough to see this become a reality!

Truthfully I was going to love it whether it was good or crap, but the series delivered way more than I expected. Shot so beautifully with tonnes of depth of field and gritty saturated grading, the attention to detail in the props and set design was amazing and the writing whilst starting out a little slow picked up the pace real fast and by the end I was left wanting more. And holy shit there was so much fan service from start to end. Giddy!

I thought I’d try to put together a list of my fave games of all time.

My top 10 games of my time (in no particular order):
– Fallout 4
– Black Desert Online
– The Division
– Destiny 2
– Skyrim
– Warframe
– Gran Turismo 5
– The Last Of Us
– Monster Hunter: World
– Elden Ring

Honorable mentions:
– Prey
– The Surge
– Remnant: From the Ashes
– Remnant 2
– The Witcher 3
– Horizon Zero Dawn
– Nioh
– Quake I
– Quake II
– Marathon

And if I was stranded on an island, well… if I could only play the one game for the rest of my life it would have to be Skyrim.

A couple of years ago I bought an ARPG called Last Epoch (which was in early access). 4hrs in I decided it wasn’t really my thing. The graphics were a bit too colourful and cartoony for my liking and at that time I was really just looking forward to Diablo IV launching.

Fast forward and the game is set to officially launch in 2 days from now.

Last weekend I bought another game called Helldivers 2 and sadly, even though the game was 11 days into launch, their servers melted and the majority of players who bought the game can’t get on to play. Seeing the frustration (understatement as some people are VERY angry) on the Helldivers 2 subreddit, and seeing the game review bombed on Steam I thought I’d hop on the Last Epoch subreddit to ask if we should expect the servers to melt on launch. Amazingly I got this response from Judd, the game director for Last Epoch and founder of Eleventh Hour Games:

We’ve scale tested for months with third parties, consultants, the help of infra providers, and our own backend team. We have the ability to scale servers quickly, have reserved a large amount of bare metal machines, and do not have a maximum spend for cloud overflow- it’s all elastic. From the extensive testing we’ve done, unless we do have a really crazy turnout, we should be stable. It’s not lost on us that many much larger companies than us have had issues at launch though… We’re optimistic and if there are issues it certainly won’t be for lack of effort, spend, or ignorance to the importance of launch day.

If we do have issues I promise that we’ll stay very communicative and you can be 100% certain we’ll be all hands on deck working to resolve anything that comes up. We understand what’s on the line.

I will say that this is probably the most stressing thing to team as we’ve seen games be review bombed and eviscerated when there are launch issues. I remember being frustrated when games I was excited for had launch issues in the past, but now being on the other side of it I’ve seen how much of an emotional toll it can take on a team to face hatred for something that people have tried hard to prepare for but it not be received/gone well despite best efforts. Just in general I think it’s a good thing for the gaming community to understand the impact those types of things have on development teams. That’s not me asking for leniency for our team, just rather an insight I feel worth sharing for gamers in general.

Another thing I’ll share because it’s interesting and something I didn’t understand before being in game development before LE – it’s nearly never the game servers that have issues at launch as those are easy to scale as long as you have the funds and willingness to pay the server providers (typically Google or Amazon), it’s more often an issue with services like login/authentication/database rate limiting. We use Steam and other services that are battle tested at scale for these things.

But, in summary, we’ve prepared heavily and have every reason to suspect we’ll be in good shape come launch day. If there are issues we’ll be communicative and working to address anything that comes up immediately.

Thanks all, sorry for the long post here.

Now that’s how you do community! What a response. If you watch the video above you’ll note that this game started as a post on reddit. I’m pretty excited to play the game now knowing that the devs have clearly been working with the community to develop this game.

EDIT: Launch day was today (4am Sydney time) and the game was down for 6hrs (though you could play it in offline mode if you chose to). I managed to log in at 11am or so and have played for most of the day without any issues at all! Awesome work by the devs. Here’s a day 1 recap from Judd the game director/founder: https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/1awz34h/launch_day_recap_from_game_directorfounder/

EDIT 2. My reddit post made the news!

Marathon, Destiny 1 player and Day 1 Destiny 2 player here (currently 3,168 hrs in D2 on record).

I stopped playing Destiny 2 after The Witch Queen (which I absolutely loved and still think was Bungie’s best D2 DLC to date), mainly because I got sick of complaining about the state of the game so much. IE: I loved the game so much that I hated it.

For the past 2 years I’ve been playing Diablo Immortal, II, III and IV, Starfield, Fallout IV and Starfield. It’s been a good break (much more chill gaming experiences than Destiny grandmasters and raids that’s for sure!), but more recently I played through Remnant 2, and replayed through Remnant from the Ashes too which got me back in the mood for more pew pew pew action again.

A friend I was playing these games with wanted to give Destiny 2 a go (and a friend who never left D2 has been trying to get me to pick up the game again for years now). Initially I was dead set on never playing D2 again as I was certain that I was getting more enjoyment from regularly checking in to this reddit and YouTube for all the Destiny 2 drama, but a part of me wants to put the final nail in the coffin with The Final Shape, so I thought fuck it. I’ll re-install it.

The first few hours of returning to D2 was fucking savage. I was bombarded with pop-ups enticing me to spend money on this and that. I had forgotten just about everything; How the fuck do I bring up my sparrow again? Ohhhh, bring up the ghost first, then the sparrow… how do I do finishers again? How do I upgrade weapons and where do I turn in bounties? The UI is an absolute mess, not to mention my friend who was new to the game was even more lost than I was and my mate who never left was absolutely decimating everything on the screen in every activity we were doing.

I started doing what the seasonal quest tab was telling me to do, then the game was trying to get me to do an activity I didn’t have access to, so I bought the season pass, then the game tells me the activity is part of Season 22 and I can’t do it unless I buy the annual pass?! Fucking what?!

So fuck me dead. I pay for Lightfall + the annual pass (despite watching ALL the negative review videos on YouTube). I start out at 1600 light level and can’t grind for the Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk (Void Hunter for life!) as I’m WAY too low for legend lost sectors. OK I gotta level up. Then it hits me… I have to grind bounties (lots of them) and do the same old shit I’ve been doing for the past 10+ years. At this stage I was just about to rage quit again, but then it happened. I started grinding bounties, then strikes, then the crucible and even fucking gambit and dares of eternity, and just like smoking the first cigarette after quitting for months I was hooked once more.

Fuck this game!

Posted on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/18qqc97/returning_player_just_like_that_im_hooked_again/

Chardae.

Just some more photoshop fun (where I photoshop faces of my clanmates onto Diablo art).

Dark, moody, awesome.

Finished the main campaign at level 35, now on to Hell!

I bought Diablo II Resurrected a year or so ago, but just couldn’t get into it. I almost instantly found it too old school and too hardcore, but in retrospect it’s Diablo Immortal (and now Diablo IV) that’s to blame for making me soft. IE: The new games have so much inventory space, waypoints, no penalties on death (in D2 you have to go back to your dead body to pick up your gold and gear) and more mod cons.

Recently I brought up the idea of playing Diablo III with Chardae and Laci who are both on XBOX. I have D3 on PC, but there’s no controller support, or cross play, so if I wanted to play with them I’d have to buy an XBOX. Ultimately I couldn’t justify the costs and feeling left out (fomo as both of them bought D3 for XBOX) I thought I’d try D2R again and I’m SO glad I did.

I now understand why hardcore Diablo fans consider D2 to be the best of the franchise. I feel like I now know and understand the lore of Diablo so much more. In my playthrough I came across so many characters and locations (even specific dungeon names) that have been re-used and referenced in the new games. It all felt a little like déjà vu, or, reverse engineering?! Kinda like learning how to drive in an automatic, but then learning and mastering a manual.

Hung out and shot again with Cathy (who I call Laci, which is short for her in-game name Lacivious), who’s a Diablo gamer friend, and now a legit model as she’s been picked up by a modelling agency and now stars in the latest Breast Screen campaign.