Category Archives: MMOGs

You Can’t Go Hearthstone Again

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I hadn’t played WoW in quite a while, but I wound up buying Legion in the recent Black Friday sale and have been working my way through Pandaria with my shadow priest (with xp disabled once I hit 90 so I don’t overlevel too much), and it’s been fun in that comfortably-scratches-an-old-itch sense, but I’m still feeling kind of unsatisfied overall.

I think that’s more on me than the game, though. For a while now I thought I’d just been temporarily “burned out” on MMOs and would eventually come back to them refreshed and ready to go again, much like other gaming genres at various times, but it just hasn’t happened. I think I just don’t have room in my life anymore for the social and time commitments for raiding and regular grouping, and past that, sure there are some new sights to see and new mechanics to play with here and there, but an awful lot of what’s left is just more bear ass collection and faction grinding.

And I could apply that equally well to Guild Wars 2, LOTRO, EQ2, etc. Sorry MMOs, you were fun while it lasted!

(Wish I’d realized that before buying expansions for some of these that I never even reached. :P )

Yeah, I Know…

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I haven’t really been playing that many different games lately, just mainly fiddling with different Minecraft mods now and then, but I’m trying to get back to finishing more stuff.  To summarize the last few months:

Mass Effect 3: Finished it long ago, but now that all of the DLC is out, I’m starting to work my way through that.  I just did Leviathan, which is only a few hours long, but adds some interesting backstory to the universe.  Not bad.

Forza Horizon: I did wind up picking it up and completed pretty much every single race in it.  It’s not quite as open as say, TDU, but it’s still a much more open, looser racing experience than the main Forza games, which can be a bit stuffy and ‘sterile’.  Well worth it.

LOTRO: I kinda lost interest towards the end of Moria, where it was just endless wandering of twisty corridors and revisiting spots over and over again.  When the anniversary event came around this year, I managed to push through and finish most of those areas, so I can finally move on to the post-Moria content.

World of Warcraft: I caved in and bought Pandaria, but haven’t really done much with it yet.  I created a Pandaren monk and got her to level 16, but the urge to continue on isn’t all that great.

The Simpsons: Tapped Out: Yeah, it’s one of those silly social games, but as a minor Simpsons fan I figured I should at least check it out.  It’s kinda fun designing your own little version of Springfield, ‘quests’ keep you interested in what might be uncovered next, and the atmosphere’s pretty much what you expect, but it’s also a pretty blatant cash grab.  Oodles of premium-only buildings, and the cost of the premium currency seems absurd, like you’d have to spend hundreds of dollars to get it all.  It also doesn’t help that I continually get disconnected from the server, and reconnecting often hangs forever, and I need to force quit the app and relaunch it.

Coming up, in the short term, I’m hoping to finally get some time into Dragon’s Dogma and Borderlands 2, at least.

MMO Mania

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Yeah, I’ve been slacking again…  I’ve been spending a lot of time in MMOs lately, and they always make it easy to overlook spending some time on other games as well.

My mesmer is up to level 40 in Guild Wars 2 now.  I haven’t really said much about it, but it has been different enough from the traditional MMO experience to remain fairly fun.  The world events manage to keep me involved in group efforts and pull off what feels like meaningful wins without actually forcing me to group up with random yahoos.  Crafting is interesting in that it rewards you for experimenting, but I’m also often left frustrated at not being able to figure out what the fourth ingredient in some recipe is, and the drop rate on the ‘fine’ ingredients leaves my crafting lagging behind.  The personal story missions sometimes feel unfairly difficult — in one of them I had to face three waves of 5-8 enemies each wave and just kept dying over and over and over again while gradually whittling them down — but at least they’re trying something a bit more personally customized. Tactics can be quite different even within the same class depending on what talents and weapons you use; I’m doing well with both the staff and scepter/gun combos with my mesmer (scepter/gun is more of a glass cannon, unloading a ton of damage at once but then having to survive until cooldowns refresh, whereas staff is more about stacking condition damage), but could still stand to practice and experiment with other combos, too.  Haven’t tried any of the dungeons or PvP yet either.

I’ve also been playing more LOTRO, getting my lore-master up to level 26, and I also created a few alts to do other tradeskills on, since components for them were clogging up my bank and bank slots are expensive.  I’ve finally moved out of the ‘lowbie’ zones into the Lone-lands and North Downs, where spots of civilization are starting to become farther apart.

It’s Hard To Put Down The Books Too

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I popped into Lord Of The Rings Online this morning intending just to check the points store, since there’s some kind of summer sale going on, but I wound up playing a good 6 hours or so and doing a bunch of quests for the summer festival event and getting the Sunshine title.  I really should put more time into LOTRO…if I can remember how to actually play my character…  I think I only killed maybe three things today, that got in my way as the rest was just running around, talking, racing horses, and fishing.

Cobblers Vs. Blacksmiths

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Didn’t have time for a game yesterday, but today I finally got to check out Guild Wars 2, albeit in beta form.  I’m only up to level 4 so far, and haven’t checked out crafting or the skill tracks or such, but it’s been fun.  I still don’t fully understand mesmer combat yet, but there are a couple interesting twists from the usual cast-damage-over-and-over.  And besides the typical quests (‘tasks’ in this case) there are events that everyone can jump into as they happen, and are a big, hectic ball o’ fun.

Hallelujah!

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Tonight, the SOE games suddenly came back online sooner than expected (the last update Sony gave said it was still “at least a few more days”), and I immediately hopped back into EQ2. Doing the tradeskill dailies in Odus for my Illusionist bumped him up to level 85 crafting, and with that I headed off to Velious and knocked out almost the entire tradeskill quest chain within a few hours. That took him right to level 90 jewelcrafting, and he now just has to go back after a day or two (the NPC won’t talk to me again until then) to get the whistle for starting the flying mount quests.

The MMO Mashup

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WoW: The big news here of course is Cataclysm, which came while this site was idle…and went. I made it through all of the zone content fairly quickly, usually only taking a couple days per zone. It was fun enough, but it’s awfully railroaded, with almost no choice in how to go about working your way through things.

After that, the expansion felt kind of empty. There wasn’t really any reason to revisit the zones, I didn’t feel like grinding instances over and over for equipment I didn’t really need for anything, the faction grinding rewards seemed kind of weak, archaeology was fun for a while but now it’s down to tediously grinding for Uldum sites… Cataclysm is probably the expansion I lost interest in the quickest. About the only thing I really ought to do is work some more on my Worgen druid and see what the revamped lower level zones are like, but it’s a low priority.

EQ2: I can’t remember where I left off, but our group has pretty much finished with The Bonemire, and…we haven’t really done anything lately. Scheduling problems meant we couldn’t get the group together for a few weeks, and with that loss of momentum, we haven’t even bothered trying to regroup in a couple months now.

I’ve still been playing a fair bit by myself, though. I got my mystic up to level 90 alchemy and took him through all of the tradeskill quest lines in the Odus and Velious expansions, netting a flying mount in the process and unlocking some faction gear I can’t wear yet. I’ve also been leveling my illusionist alt, getting him to 72 and taking him through the Kunark zones right now and working on his tradeskill as well.

Vanguard: And I finally gave Vanguard a shot, along with a handful of other forum members who got caught by the curiosity bug around the same time. I’m only level 14, having gone through the tutorial island and a small handful of quests on the mainland, so it’s still early yet, but it seems like a pretty decent game. It has some of that old-school EverQuest feel, but with a more interesting combat system, unique crafting and diplomacy systems, and a lot to see and do.

Champions Online: And oh yeah, I tried this too, but the tutorial section didn’t really grab me, so I never bothered going back to it, even though it’s now free-to-play.

I’d like to get back and play more EQ2 and Vanguard still, but, well, there’s still that whole SOE-is-down-for-who-knows-how-long thing…

Oh Right, This Thing

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Yes, it’s time for yet more catching up.

I finished Forza 3 today. Well, again… I finished the six basic seasons long ago, but that left a lot of events unfinished, and today I finally got the Solid Gold achievement for getting gold in every single event. It took a while, and now there’s pretty much nothing left to do in it. Just in time for Gran Turismo 5…

I also finished off Mass Effect 2 shortly after my last post about it. There wasn’t really that much left to do at that point, just finishing off the loyalty missions and then off to the Omega 4 relay. The final mission worked out pretty well, requiring you to actually know your team, even if the final boss fight was a bit dumb. Still well worth it overall, and I’ll be looking forward to Mass Effect 3, where Liara better be more grateful about my remaining faithful to her!

I started Etrian Odyssey 3 on the DS, and it plays a lot like the first one so far, with a new sailing/fishing/exploring side game that haven’t done much with yet. I’m still only on the first floor though, and just about to gather up enough courage to go down to the next one.

And I also started a rather unusual game on the PSP: Zettai Hero Project: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. It’s by the Disgaea guys and is kind of similar in certain ways, but different in a lot of others too. It’s turn based and you accumulate levels, but you only have yourself, you move one square at a time, your time in a dungeon is limited by an energy meter, items have a durability and wear out fairly quickly, enemy behaviour is somewhat more explicit about activation ranges and how they’ll react, you have a prinny wife… And of course, the story is Weird As Hell. It’s interesting and fun so far though, but I’m still only just barely out of the tutorial.

And in the MMO world, I did more of the Hallowe’en event quests, and am down to 11 quests left for Loremaster on my priest, but that’s about it. In EQ2 we did some more quests in the ‘Peacock Club’ quest line, but took a break last week and checked out a new zone, Pillar of Flame, picking up and completing some more quests there. We’re still level 60, but will probably begin leveling up again sometime soon.

By far I probably spent the most time in Minecraft, but that’s a whole separate topic…

More MMO Mania

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Things have been picking up again in the MMO worlds.

WoW finally released its 4.0.1 patch, pretty much completely redoing how skills and talent trees and stats work and forcing everyone to redo their talent selections. I’ve caught up on the main trees for my priest, warrior, and mage, and so far the differences aren’t huge, but it might require more play to really tell. My mage seems to have completely lost some buffs he used to have, though. The actual Cataclysm changes are still a ways away, but hopefully I’ll get my Loremaster achievement finished before then.

In EQ2, we finally got a full group together for a couple of weeks, so we’ve worked on the heritage quest for Rahotep’s staff and some faction grinding for the Maj’Dul quests. Unfortunately we aren’t quite strong enough for Rahotep’s final step yet — we gave it a try, but he’s an EpicX2 monster, and we just couldn’t damage him quickly enough. Maybe with a handful of more levels; we’ve managed to defeat an EpicX2 before with just the four of us, but it was on the verge of turning grey to us.

EQ2 also launched the Hallowe’en event, and today I took my mystic through the major quests that are part of it. One of them involved a hedge maze where I kept getting stronger and stronger as I defeated more enemies, and at the end I took on an EpicX2 boss all by myself and won. I’ll have to redo that one a few times, both just for fun and for other rewards like collectibles and a quest that only opens up on the second attempt. A couple of the other quests also have rewards for repeated attempts that I’ll have to try for.

And I finally got around to canceling my subscription to Asheron’s Call. I’d resubscribed earlier this year with the intent of revisiting it, seeing what was new, checking out the old stomping grounds, etc., but…it’s just not going to happen, at this rate. Sayonara, AC.

Disk Space Unleashed

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Argh, I’m falling out of the habit of updating again… There was a stretch where I didn’t play anything since I was out of town, but there is still a bunch to talk about.

I finished off The Force Unleashed, finally freeing up the 30 gigs of disk space it was taking up. Some of the boss fights were fairly tense and I almost lost, even playing on easy, but otherwise it was still just a matter of slogging through it to see the story. I played the three DLC packs too, but they were fairly short and easy.

On a whim I finally played The Path, a rather artsy non-game where you wander around the woods as one of six girls in a weird take on Little Red Riding Hood. Around the woods you find items relating to the girls’ personalities, encounter their (oft-metaphorical) ‘wolf’, and then tour through a bizarre interpretation of Grandma’s house. I’m not sure I learned anything from it, but it was interesting trip if you appreciate surreality.

Now that I’m pretty much done with Picross 3D, my puzzle game impulse is being satisfied by Everyday Genius: SquareLogic. It’s Sudoku-like in that you have to make the rows and columns of a square fill with non-repeating numbers, but the squares are also broken down into smaller regions with their own specific requirements, like adding up to a certain total, all numbers must be odd, one square must be higher/lower than another one, etc. It looks tough at first, but the interface helps a lot in keeping track of everything.

I downloaded F1 2010 on Steam and played through a race, albeit on the easy and shortened weekend settings just to get a taste. It plays well though, feeling authentic enough, with a decent amount of control over things like your own career and R&D. I’ll definitely have to put more time into it.

EQ2 hasn’t progressed much, as I was gone for a week. I caught up on the faction grinding I missed out on, but another group member was missing this last week, so we just goofed around in the Cleft of Rujark dungeon off of Sinking Sands.

And then there’s Minecraft. That’ll deserve its own post…