Endgame Viable

Trion Worlds was just acquired by a company called Gambino. No wait, it’s Gamigo. I don’t have much to say about this except I’ve never heard of Gamigo before. I’m hardly an expert in the global operations of every company in the gaming industry, but it does seem a little bit strange that the name Gamigo has never crossed my MMO radar in the last twenty years. They seem to be based in Germany, so maybe it’s not that surprising. The first impressions I’m hearing from people on social media are not particularly good. (668 words.)

I just realized this image is pretty similar to the Horizon Zero Dawn image in my last post. I mentioned that I had abandoned The Last Of Us and gotten into Horizon Zero Dawn, so of course, right after that, I abandoned Horizon Zero Dawn and got back into The Last Of Us. (1577 words.)

I woke this morning to an almost literally freezing cold house, which means that we can no longer pretend that the cold months of the year won’t happen. By “we” I mean “me,” because there are some people who actually like the transition from summer to fall. I personally spend most days between November and March in three or four layers of clothes, moving slowly, barely staving off uncontrollable shivering fits, unable to concentrate, hiding in the darkness that consumes most of each day. (582 words.)

Horizon Zero Dawn, the only thing I’ve played in the last week. I was trying yet again to think of something interesting to write, when I saw Roger talking about Blaugust this morning, which led me to Gevlon talking about Blaugust, where I found out that I’m no longer an active blogger. I mean, sure, I haven’t posted in a week, whereas I normally try to post something once or twice a week. But man, talk about a tough room. (1201 words.)

But I have to admit there is something deeply funny about questing in a business suit. MapleStory 2 is one of those MMOs that I never would have looked at twice, except that there’s nothing else to look at right now. See previous post lamenting the pitiable dearth of MMORPGs. The last Nexon game I played was Riders of Icarus, which I did not think much of. I even downloaded and tried it again yesterday, and I still didn’t like it. It sounds like a cool idea to have a game built around collecting mounts and such, but none of that seems to exist at the beginning of the game, which is a huge disappointment. The UI and all the “advertisements” plastered all over the screen are very off-putting as well. (588 words.)

I stumbled upon a headline from Blaugust alumni MMOist about Bless Online launching for reals on October 23. I’ve alternated between interest and disinterest on this title since at least 2017, but I knew I wasn’t going to spend a cent on it until I could play it first. (Especially after Bhagpuss’s first impressions, parts one and two, made it sound like as uninspired a game as it could possibly be made to sound.) Luckily for me it looks like the game will launch as free-to-play. (666 words.)

I saw that Sypster posted about returning to Guild Wars 2, so in the absence of anything else to write about, I’ll relay my own experience with that very subject. Back in July, I went ahead and uninstalled Guild Wars 2. Partly because I’d grown to strongly dislike the gameplay (as opposed to the nominal experience of mildly disliking it), and partly because I didn’t think much of ArenaNet anymore. (And still don’t.) (787 words.)

My World of Warcraft subscription ended weeks ago, and the last time I actually played was September 3rd, a month ago. I meant to go back and complete the Siege of Boralus but I got too involved playing The Witcher again. I rescued Jaina though, so that was a good-enough ending for me. I figured I should finally post what I thought of the expansion. I get the impression there’s a lot of people complaining about Battle for Azeroth. I don’t see that myself. I only see the people saying, “Gosh there’s a lot of people angry about this expansion.” I don’t know where people are looking to see all these angry people, or why people are even looking there. I’ve only seen people reporting what I consider to be legitimate criticisms in a fairly respectful way. (938 words.)

I uploaded the last episode of my Fallout 4 podcast yesterday. It took me a while to get the concluding episode out due to injuring my hand and cataract surgery and, frankly, a bit of malaise, but it’s finally done. Here is the series page, though it displays the episodes in reverse order. It’s a serial podcast, so it’s better if you start at the first one. In all there are 21 episodes for a total of about 5 hours of listening. As a body of work, I’m quite proud of it. It’s a great story (well, mostly), but it’s also the most complicated piece of audio engineering I’ve completed in quite some time. I wrote a number of scripts and figured out a lot of FFMPEG command-line options to streamline the processing of each episode. (244 words.)

Even with a week and a half of down time from cataract surgery, I still managed to play a few games this past month. The Witcher (Enhanced Edition), 39 hours. This is what I spent most of my gaming time doing after World of Warcraft and before surgery, and a little bit afterward to finish up the story. This is the first time I’ve finished the whole game. It got kind of weird at the end. Dragon Age: Inquisition, 5 hours. I restarted this a number of times with different classes, trying to find something to play after WoW. But it didn’t stick (again). World of Warcraft, 5 hours. The last bit before I lost interest. I don’t think I logged in for the last week of my subscription time. See you in two years for the next expansion, WoW! One problem with console gaming is that I don’t know where to find statistical data showing how much I played on the PS4. But I would guess I played 6 or 7 hours of The Last of Us (Remastered) this month. (296 words.)