Month: December 2018

As of today, my school’s two week winter break has started. There are a few things I want to do during the time I have when there’s no school. Things like making progress in music and games.

When I started thinking about the winter break I immediately thought of making progress in the video games I’m playing. Currently, I’m still playing mostly osu! with the occasional Black Desert, CS:GO, and Fortnite. I don’t have any plans on getting any new games, but that could change depending on what’s on sale.

Overall, I would like to get a tablet before the break is over for osu!, but I’m quite sure that if I ordered one like the CTH-471 it wouldn’t arrive in time. However, it still kind of is in my plan for now. The past few weeks I’ve only made one decent play that brought me up by around 1000 rank that was worth 116pp. Other than that though I haven’t made much progress.

In Black Desert Online the new Archer class was released this week. Usually when new classes are released there are special sales and events, so I’d like to check out if there’s anything I could benefit from. Additionally, my Dark Knight is at level 55 which is only one level away from getting the awakening quests at level 56. Before the break ends I think I’ll spend some time every now and then trying to get closer to leveling up since now it’s taking me many hours to level up just once.

Although I’ve been trying to play some more Counter Strike, I haven’t really been playing as much as I thought I would be. The past few weeks I’ve only played a few games for fun with some friends, but I haven’t had the confidence to jump into solo queue on my own that much. That’s why over the break I want to at least play some more.

There’s not really much I want to do with Fortnite since I don’t really feel like it’s worth my time to try and get better at the game. Nowadays there are players that you die to every other game that seems to do nothing other than play the game 24/7. It makes the game feel like no matter how much you play and practice there are always people that just play way more than you do. That’s why now I kind of just play for fun not expecting to win or get better.

As for music, I’m planning on trying to figure out how to write my own music even if it’s just writing a few seconds of music. As long as it sounds nice then I’d be happy with it. I also want to finish practicing the arrangement I wrote a while ago so I can record it.

This year our family isn’t really planning to travel anywhere, so I have time to stay home and do all the different things I want to do. I’m pretty sure most of my other friends will also be just staying home playing games as well, so we’ll just be having fun playing games.

Two days ago, my brother Jason and his school’s music department were having a winter concert. I’ll be writing about what I thought of their performance this week.

Since the concert was made of the student’s music department the musicians were students from grade 9 to 12 except for the main conductor who was the school’s music teacher. The programme consisted of different bands, orchestras, and things like that. Each “group” performed around one to three pieces with a 15-minute intermission in the middle of the show.

Being around winter time there was a Christmas medley played in the beginning by a flute choir. For the rest of the show, it mostly consisted of themes from shows and movies as well as other classical pieces. There were a notable amount of performances made from the side stage where a duet or quartet was performing.

The actual performances didn’t sound too bad in my opinion. I haven’t really been to many orchestral performances, so I can’t really say what a good one sounds like. However, there were some pieces where I thought a few of the musicians were playing a bit flat for some reason. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to sound like that or if it was just me. I personally thought they should’ve been playing at a higher pitch at some parts though. Besides that and a kind of sloppy electric guitar solo for one of the songs, the rest of the show was quite good.

Overall I think the show went quite well, and I enjoyed most of it. I pretty much didn’t know any of the musicians that were performing, but I did see a few people that had graduated from my school in previous years.

This week, specifically yesterday, Season 6 of Fortnite Battle Royale ended and Epic Games introduced Season 7. After they buffed shotguns again around a week or so ago I might actually start playing the game more.

There were a lot of things added in this update, but I’d like to start with the new battle pass of the season first. Just like every other season, there’s a new battle pass, and this time it seems pretty good. There are new additions though with the wraps which change the way your weapons and vehicles look. Other than those, the battle pass is pretty much what you’d expect with new skins and emotes.

For the gameplay aspects, a few items were changed and a new vehicle was added. The clingers, chillers, port-a-forts, double barrel shotgun, shockwave grenades, and shadow stones have all been removed. I think most of these items’ removal can be justified besides the shockwave grenades which I feel like they could’ve left in the game. The balloons were changed so that you can have up to three balloons on your back allowing you to use items and weapons. I think this makes the application of balloons a lot more useful. The stack size was also reduced down to ten. The new vehicle addition is the X-4 Stormwing Plane although I can already predict people will just call it a plane since the name is way too long. The X-4 Stormwing Plane can seat up to five players and has a mounted machine gun that can overheat. Many different movement controls on the plane make it quite mobile. They spawn pretty much all across the map in certain locations though it looks like if you go to Frosty Flights there’s a better chance you’ll find a few.

Speaking of Frosty Flights, there was quite the map overhaul which introduced the new snow biome. It takes up almost a quarter of the map replacing Greasy Grove and Flush Factory. There are ice patches that players can slide around on and zip lines in certain locations where players can also use their weapons and items on them.

That’s all for the Season 7 changes, but there was also another gamemode that was added in called “Creative”. Creative is pretty much an improved version of the playground mode where you can create multiple islands, spawn in any items, have infinite materials, create prefabs, and even fly. To be honest it’s pretty much Minecraft mixed in with Fortnite, and there are lots of different things you can do with it since your islands will also save. I think it will be very interesting to see what other people can do with it and what my friends and I will do with it.

Overall, the past updates from Epic Games seem pleasing and I think the game is slowly going back into the right direction. I’m looking forward to getting back on and trying things out.

This week I was originally going to write about how I was getting back into the game Black Desert Online, but it turns out I haven’t written about it before. That’s why I’ll just be writing my whole experience in general this week.

Black Desert Online or BDO is an open world MMORPG which mostly revolves around its graphics and combat mechanics. First of all, the graphics in this game are extremely good. Out of every single video game I’ve ever played BDO has the best graphics I’ve seen. This is especially true after the remastered update a few months ago. Black Desert is the one game where I prefer high settings over fps.

The combat in the game is generally the same between the different classes although there are some differences. Usually, a character’s skills use only a few keys, but there are many different combos that you can use if you memorize them. The usage of different classes in combat differs though. At the start of BDO, I started with a Witch class which is more of a support class. Therefore, it wasn’t that fun and it became difficult to grind mobs, so I moved over to the Dark Knight class a few weeks ago and I’m having a lot more fun.

Up until endgame, most of BDO is PvE and then it moves over to heavy PvP. When you level your character to the higher levels there aren’t any dungeons like in other MMOs. The game mostly focuses on Node Wars and Castle Sieges between players at endgame.

Besides the gameplay aspects, I think the game’s character creation is really good compared to other games I’ve seen. The controls in the creation menu are kind of complicated, but usually, you can get something close to what you want your character to look. If you aren’t interested in PvP, the game also offers a large variety of life skills such as alchemy, cooking, and fishing. You could also just explore the world if you really wanted to.

Originally I had taken a break from the game as my current class wasn’t really enjoyable without friends all the time. Now I’ve started getting back into the game with a different class. Overall, for my first MMO experience, I’m having fun so far. I’ve heard that endgame does get really “grindy” in terms of gaining levels, but I’d like to try out the life skills in the game by then.