Morning Ramble 382: #SWL, Affinity Photo, and Coincidences

Morning Ramble 382: Bees, Affinity, and Coincidences

These past few days have had some huge time sinks that have pulled at my time to put together posts. I had planned on being through episode 1 of American Gods this week and preparing to get rolling with the second while moving quickly through the beginning of SWL to start banging out missions in Kingsmouth proper, but my best laid plans have gone astray. Instead, I’ll be happy to get anything out and look at improving my time management to avoid the time sinks that have drained me all week.

Secret World Legends: The Bee

It all starts out with a bee. Just like in The Secret World, it’s the bees that get things moving in Secret World Legends.

The game starts with a cutscene where your character is asleep and she swallows a bee…or the bee infests her…or the bee … whatever, the bee gets inside her and changes start happening. Actually, the initial cutscene seems to be pretty similar if not the same as we saw in The Secret World, but that’s not a bad thing, I really like the setup for the story.

You have a dream that sets you’re imagination in motion and you are offered the opportunity to become a monarch or a beggar and are told you’ll see the end of days…pretty ominous but cool.

But you swallowed a bee…that sucks!

As I said changes begin…you start exhibiting abilities and you’re life goes to hell…I mean what do you expect would happen if you started being unable to stop yourself from zapping everything in your apartment.

You’re knocked out by your abilities and awake to see your front door open to a graveyard and someone hanging out outside…ut oh!

But, it’s really the beginning of the tutorial.

I actually like the placement of the tutorial for Secret World Legends – in TSW, it would take quite a bit of watching a long cutscene before being able to interact with the game at all, but here, they start the cutscene and introduce you to the fact that you’ve got some powers and then they ask you to start interacting with game. I think the pacing is much better than the long unbroken cutscene of TSW.

Affinity Photo

Yesterday I mentioned that I was trying something new…well, that thing is Affinity Photo on my iPad. This is a full fledged photo editing application that you can use on an iPad. It’s really cool and I feel like I’ve got all the features of Photoshop right here on my iPad. Sure, Adobe has a ton of apps for the iPad, but they all seem to do one things well. If you want to annotate something, use one app. If you want to trim down and zoom in on a part of an image, use a different app. If you want to adjust the color saturation or levels, use another app. I basically found that I was using 4–5 different Adobe apps on my iPad to do what I wanted to do on a regular basis. Or I could jump to my PC/Mac and get things done with Photoshop. It was annoying that Adobe broke everything down into separate apps.

Affinity Photo pulls everything together into one app. And that app seems to do all the stuff the 4–6 Adobe apps do, but you don’t have to keep switching from one thing to another. It even saves directly to Dropbox, which I could never figure out in any of the Adobe apps – they always wanted me to store things in the Creative Cloud. I’ve only been using Affinity Photo a few days so I haven’t fully exercised it yet, but so far it’s taking care of everything I regularly do. Resizing, cut & paste, blur, mask, erase, it all seems to be there, and it works. With this competition, perhaps Adobe with bring all their apps together, but for now, I’m gonna be using Affinity for image manipulation on my iPad.

Coincidences

Things have been full of weird coincidences lately between Secret World Legends, American Gods, and Preacher.

This shot from American Gods sure looks similar to the views from Agartha in SWL…

And in American Gods, Shadow and Wednesday have been running around the country looking for gods to recruit while Preacher comes right out and proclaims they are searching for God…