Endgame Viable

There were a few big news items in the gaming world that I failed to mention, largely because they didn’t mean that much to me, but if I smash them all together perhaps I can make a post out of them. From the Ashes of Creation press kit. Ashes of Creation and My.com The first is Ashes of Creation’s publishing deal with My.com. My understanding is this is a European deal so theoretically it doesn’t affect me anyway. (652 words.)

From the [new New World game site][1]. Cool for a game, but loads of historicity to pick apart there. :) We got our first “hands on” look at Amazon’s New World from Tech Advisor UK, and it doesn’t look pretty. (I mean, it looks pretty, sure, but I am referring to the gameplay.) (680 words.)

So we meet again, blank page. Stop yelling at me, now-a-total-of-150-draft-posts-I-can’t-use, you know what you did. Ever wonder why I embed the image in the post and also set it as the "featured image" in WordPress, so it shows up twice on the web site? For the RSS feed. I design my posts almost exclusively for RSS feed readers. (627 words.)

Screenshots! Because it’s that kind of a day. A friendly, inviting architectural feature for the entrance to a building. Here we see the bow of a boat built in a house, and the incredibly rare Swift Stormsaber mount that I usually ride in WoW. (108 words.)

Drustvar, the brown zone … for a few steps, until the lighting changes. Today is not just an “I can’t think of anything to write” day, it’s an “I actively don’t want to write because I hate the way I write” day. I was working on a post about comments last night but it’s not finished and I don’t want to post it until it is. (581 words.)

The Blaugust theme of the week is Developer Appreciation, but I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to write on this topic. It’s one of those situations where I have to decide whether to write what I think everyone expects, or write what I actually think. I’m sure the intention here is to simply state, “I think games are great and I don’t think developers should get death threats on Twitter!” But that sounds a lot like “Sky Is Blue Week” or “Water Is Wet Week” to me. Of course I appreciate the developers of the games I play. I wouldn’t be buying or writing about their games if I didn’t! Of course I don’t think developers should be getting death threats, because I’m a normal human being who understands cause and effect, and the consequences of my actions. (830 words.)

Thanks to a post from Leo’s Life, I learned about a web site called Realm Pop. It’s a very simple site that charts demographics information about all of the World of Warcraft servers. I’ve always suspected that I played World of Warcraft on a fairly low population server (Undermine), but now I can finally see it in black-and-white: 232,356 players. And that is including the populations of its two “connected” realms, Anvilmar and Xavius. So it’s actually 232k people spread out over three different servers. (493 words.)

That’s not Teldrassil, that’s the new city in Kul Tiras, which I can confirm is, in fact, sprawling and confusing. I’m already tired of writing about Battle for Azeroth and I’ve played for less than 4 hours. It’s possible that you can infer something on how I feel about MMORPGs in general right now, but I’ll leave that to the reader’s imagination. (699 words.)

Finding spoiler-free screenshots typically results in rather bland imagery for blog posts. The second problem with writing post after post about Battle for Azeroth, besides boring everyone to death, is that nobody is going to read them. Everyone is avoiding spoilers, so nobody is going to click on a post about the expansion two days in. (I wouldn’t, and I’m generally not reading WoW posts right now.) (745 words.)

I re-activated my World of Warcraft subscription this morning and played the new expansion for about 45 minutes. Hardcore! I had some hope that I might avoid spamming posts about Battle for Azeroth, but what else is there to talk about? I also made an appointment to take my dog and cat to the vet next week. Not exactly riveting stuff. I’m going to refrain from mentioning any of the negative observations I made and just focus on the good things. We live in a time when even constructive criticism is interpreted as a personal affront to most fans. (It’s a bit like politics… you can either express hate for games, or express love for games, but anything in between is socially unacceptable now.) In reality it’s the same World of Warcraft with all of the same pros and cons as before, but I’ll just pretend I was starstruck the whole time. (770 words.)